Scientist and Analog book reviewer Tom Easton, whose blog was just now pointed out to me by Jane Yolen, observes the terrorist potential of catheters and diuretics. “You want to ban containers of liquids? People are containers of liquids.”

Addendum by Teresa: Meanwhile, The Daily Kos is pointing out that the Bush Administration Cut Funding For Explosives Detection.

Some of you are probably aware that Teresa and I have a long-running disagreement about Making Light’s default type size. Teresa likes to see as many words as possible on screen at any given time. I prefer to be able to see actual letterforms and words without experiencing insane eyestrain and headaches. Since Making Light was Teresa’s blog before it was anyone else’s, so far she’s won.

Of course most modern browsers allow the user to increase the type size, but for whatever reason (probably mistakes deeply encoded into our heavily-messed-with front-page template), that screws up our page layout.

It would be ever so much nicer if we simply had one of those setups by which users who agree with me could click a button which reset Making Light to use an alternate CSS stylesheet that specified a larger type size in the center column. Unfortunately, I’ve tried the canonical recipe here, with no success. Surely someone among our readers can help? I honestly don’t want an explanation of principles as much as I’m hoping for a Quick Fix.

If you haven’t yet seen the Daily Show segment from earlier this week starring “Middle Eastern Affairs Correspondent” Aasif Mandvi, you’ve been missing one of the most withering things shown on television in years.

I just now noticed that Clarion West has announced its slate of instructors for 2007. I’m happy to have been invited back; the 2003 workshop was an outstanding experience. For information about Clarion West, read their FAQ and watch their website for 2007-specific information.

New heights of fake-security folly have been achieved in California, where Governor Schwarzenegger has ordered 300 members of the National Guard to cool their heels for a week or more at San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego airports.

This is supposedly in response to a recent terrorist plot discovered in London, which plot wouldn't have been stopped by having National Guardsmen hanging about at the airports. Gov. Schwarzenegger hasn't yet explained what kind of terrorist attacks he does expect will require this level of staffing.

Common Cause (ack, pthui!)* has released its second list of groups which are ostensibly untethered think tanks and public interest organizations, but which are actually controlled and funded by telephone and cable companies. (The first list came out in March.)

Unlike real grassroots public-interest groups, it doesn't have to worry about finances. It has big corporate money behind it:

If there were ever a case where you can prove the dishonest intent underlying astroturf organizations, it's this one. If all the telecommunications industry wanted to do was get their message across, they're the one group in the United States that's absolutely guaranteed to be able to do it. I mean, they're the freakin' telecommunications industry! But that's not what they did.

These corporations didn't invent or build the Internet, or the World Wide Web; but now that there's real money to be made from it, they want to get a chokehold on it. Their long-term goal is the usual one: to maximize their profits without having to create new value.

If you're new to this idea, imagine there's a rule in Monopoly that says you can pay $5,000 to have a rule changed. The first one or two players who got big enough to buy rule changes could guarantee they'd always make money and never take a fall, and that the other players would stay poor and powerless forever.

When it comes to net neutrality and other bandwidth ownership issues, the telecommunications industry has never had the slightest intention of playing fair. They don't give a damn about democratic institutions or the long-term public good. Like all the other corporations who do astroturf-based propaganda and disinformation campaigns, they think democracy and open public discourse are for little people and losers like you and me.

List #1:

Consumers for Cable Choice
FreedomWorks
Progress and Freedom Foundation
American Legislative Exchange Council
New Millennium Research Council
Frontiers of Freedom
Keep It Local NJ
Internet Innovation Alliance
MyWireless.org

List#2:

Hands Off the Internet
TV4US
NetCompetition.org
The Future… Faster
Video Access Alliance

I've said this before, and I desperately wish I weren't certain that before long I'll be saying it again: Deceiving us has become an industrial process.

George R. R. Martin demonstrates his membership in that portion of America that has not, in fact, gone stark raving mad:

The mindrot that leads to where we are is on full display in one of the comments to George’s post, where someone writes “I think it’s ironic that people say that these security measures aren’t helping, after a terrorist plot is thwarted.” As if the British had caught these guys by confiscating their toothpaste at Heathrow. In fact, from what we’re told, it appears this plot was rolled up by the traditional method, which is to say, weeks and months of hard slogging police work. And yet somehow this means the rest of us now have to submit to yet another expansion of intrusive, degrading security theater. Here’s a clue: the intrusiveness, the degradation, are the point. That hopelessness you feel? It’s what your rulers want.

What’s a dunsail? Anyone know?

Laura Miller in Salon:

As usual, if there’s a way to be stupid about something, Salon will find it.

Julie Phillips’ Tiptree bio is fantastic, perhaps the best biography ever written of a modern science fiction writer. But Tiptree was part of science fiction’s “New Wave” to roughly the same extent that the Allman Brothers Band was part of the British Invasion.

I swear to God, I want Salon to be good, I subscribe and I try to support them, and every time they write about something about which I have actual personal knowledge, they get out the big red rubber nose and the oversized shoes. I have to conclude that they’re just as retarded when they cover anything else.

(Yes, I know this is a common perception of the media in general. I know how that works and how it feels. Salon is worse.)

AuthorHouse, formerly 1st Books, is a notorious vanity publisher. As reported by Miss Snark, quoting from PW Daily:

Like many other vanity houses, AuthorHouse has never shown any evidence of actually reading the books they publish. Imagine their surprise when they discover they’re still liable for the contents. I do wonder how the suit against PublishAmerica, brought by folks who claim they were libeled in PA’s White Trash Tales of the Paranormal, is coming along.

…but we haven’t figured out how to give them less-than-nothing yet.

From USA Today:

Hey, gotta pay for Paris Hilton’s tax cuts somehow.

Remember, kids, the Republicans support our troops!

“The Pentagon” here means the civilians at the top — Donnie Rumsfeld and his gang. And what better way to make sure that needed research is done than by cutting the budget of the people doing the research?

We’ve been talking about possible civil war in Iraq for years. Many of us recognized, when death squads started roaming the land and the Golden Mosque in Samarra was blown up, that civil war was in fact in progress.

Now the serving generals are saying “civil war” in public:

Ain’t no “could” about it, John. Try “has” for a better fit.

Let’s look across the Atantic:

So, civil war, not only predicted by us scruffy hippies who only happened to be right about everything so far (when you have to match words against reality), but by top guys in America and Britain.

What’s George Bush say about that?

Comforting to know that, because we “went to the ballot box” in 1860 and 1864, there was no American Civil War from 1861 to 1865.

Imagine my surprise to discover that the general solution to the pin-tumbler lock has been discovered. That includes the locks on your car, on your house, on your mailbox … all of ‘em.

That solution is the “bump key.” What it is: a key blank with all the pin positions cut down to their lowest points. This is placed in the lock, put under a bit of torsion, and the end of the key struck smartly with an object, say the handle of a screwdriver. The key then turns, the lock opens.

Unlike standard lockpicking (which takes skill and practice, and leaves detectable marks on the lock), 80% of folks who try this, folks with no experience with lockpicking, can manage to do it on the first try leaving no forensic evidence that the lock was opened by anything but a legitimate key. And it’s quick: about as fast as the homeowner using that legitimate key.

All you need is a bump key that’ll fit in the keyhole to start with. I’m told, and I’m foolish enough to believe, that you can buy ‘em over the ‘net. Given the proper key blank and a file you can make one yourself at home. Subdivisions where all the locksets were bought from the same contractor and thus have the same keyblank are particularly vulnerable; every house can be opened using just one bump key.

Here’s a paper (.pdf) explaining how it works; here’s a video of a lad demonstrating the technique.

From this morning’s New York Times:

Some of us wondered about that particular rallying cry back when it was all the rage. But I don’t think we expected reality to lay on the irony with quite such a large trowel.

… and so prose SF has been left behind by, well, The Future.

SF was never supposed to be predictive. No, really. (Despite the Discovery Channel series that’s about to launch, which has astoundingly condescending ads — “Either they were crazy, or they were from the future!”) Prescience sells, because everybody would like to have it, or at least access to it, but specific prediction has always failed, because, well, it always does. Verne famously got ticked at Wells for making bleep up, pointing out that Wells had no Cavorite to hand, while he had used an entirely plausible cannon to launch three buckets of soup to the Moon.

The issue, among those who chose to make it one, was that SF was about thinking on possibilities for the future, that tomorrow would not be like today; at the very least, there would be more horse manure in the streets and an iron-armored, steam-driven Darth Tweed. Some people tried to see radically different things (or at least radical from standard Western viewpoints — I’m thinking of Cordwainer Smith here), but not many of them thought that they were describing the future. That was left to people who would be insulted to be called fiction writers.

And now we have a culture where many — though by no means all — people don’t need to be told that Tomorrow Will Be Different; they know that, and quite a few of them look forward to it. Now, there are degrees of this; technological change is easier to grasp than scientific change. The advantage of having a phone in your pocket with one-button 911 is obvious, even if you have no clue how cellular communication, or for that matter the 911 system, operates. Accepting the evidence for global warming is in a different mental department. Indeed, the connection between basic science and applied technology is vague in many people’s minds. And developmental time frames are all bent outta shape. There are still people who cannot comprehend why there isn’t a vaccine, or a morning-after cigarette, for HIV, and an awful lot of them seem to read The Economist.

I have great respect for Bruce Sterling, but I find it amusing that he claims that magazine SF is “worse than dull” because it clings to “literary-culture values,” when literary culture has been crapping on genre fiction for its entire history. If he means that it is constructed as prose, and not hypertext or a music video, I will take that as a valid point, but there are things that prose can do that visual media require both far more effort and vastly more artistic acuity to put across. What they are good at is transmitting extremely simple ideas; the villain kicks a dog, the hero grumbles at the outrage and shoots him. This is great if your goal is to sell a million movie tickets. It ain’t particularly good for the development of complex thought. Or, indeed, any thought at all.

But then, I’m old. And I don’t have a phone in my pocket, though I do have an electronic medical device pluged into my skin. Call it selective futurism.

[Moved, by request, from the “Making Light: Your Source” thread.]

Chad Orzel interrupts his pursuit of science to remark on recent posts around here. After linking to fully eleven more online handmade videos based on the immortal Jim Steinman song, of which this Teen Titans version isn’t even the strangest, Chad whirls around, ninja-like, to dispatch Charlie Stross’s plaint that nobody writes near-future SF any more:

This weekend marks the 40th anniversary of, quite possibly, the most transformational single album in modern popular music. Ray Newman, author of the self-published Abracadabra! The True Story of the Beatles’ Revolver, observes:

Why this should be is well covered in an excellent post from By Neddie Jingo!, of which this is just a taste:

Tappan King once observed that it’s the destiny of most powerful pop-cultural creations to trace an arc from gnosis to wallpaper. A lot of stuff from the Sixties is now on the downside of that curve. Revolver isn’t. It still stings.

Go to www.am990.com. Our own Jim Macdonald is debating PublishAmerica’s champion on the radio this afternoon. As the show’s host Ed Horrell describes it:

Click where it says “Hear us now on the Internet!”, then click where it says “AM990 Family Values.”

This post started out as a comment in the Hurra Torpedo thread, but Patrick thought it should be removed to the front page as a separate post.

So I said: Julie, funny you should mention the Bonnie Tyler video of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I've been re-watching it, trying to imagine what the hell its makers had in mind.

I can't agree with that analysis you link to. Those mysterious young men aren't her accusers. They're so wrapped up in whatever it is they have going on that they barely register her presence. (There is sexual tension present. It's all between the boys.) Their non-reaction to Bonnie Tyler's character makes me think she must be on the staff of the institution where the video takes place. This makes her the traditional uninvolved but centrally placed narrator, and sets the stage for a tale of the worldly fantastic.

The school or institution where she works is privileged, obviously well-to-do, and has been around for a while. The students have some kind of group mind/Midwich Cuckoos thing going on that makes their eyes glow in the dark and greatly increases their speed, strength, and coordination.

As the group's telepathic linkage becomes stronger, the accompanying gift of careless precision of movement manifests as group fantasies: Let's pretend we're ninjas! Let's do gymnastics in the dark! Let's put on our best rocker duds, and sing and dance our way up the main staircase! (Good riff. Starts out being weird and mystifying and kind of cool, then gets creepier and creepier.)

Bonnie Tyler's character, who's probably the school nurse or something, is torn between concern for her charges, who have falllen under this creepy influence; a more general worry about the nature and intentions of whatever is gestating here; and, eventually, fear for her own safety.

Normal communication with the outside world will of course have been cut off. The only way to get a message out is via the carrier pigeons belonging to the one nerdy young student who's a holdout from the group mind. (Note: he may be a were-pigeon.)

All we're missing is the climax, resolution, and denouement.

I don't have cherished sentimental memories of 1980s rock videos. What I remember is sitting there in a constant state of low-level astonishment, trying to figure out what the bleep was supposed to be going on in them. For instance, why did so many videos entirely consist of scenes of the singer's girlfriend desperately trying to get away from him?

What I do cherish is Scraps DeSelby's take on 80s videos: “It's a good thing that acid and MTV came along in different decades.”

My nominee for Memorable Sentence of the Day is in a news story from my home town. See if you can spot it.

Steve Gilliard reminds Billmon that despair is a luxury only some can afford.

Mark Frauenfelder thinks this is a “great” blog post:

Remember, “clueless goobers,” you don’t deserve a voice in how you’re ruled; rich cartoonists and hipster bloggers have spoken, and they agree.

Sure, it’s a joke. It’s the joke the mugger makes while he’s cleaning you out.

Hurra Torpedo, Total Eclipse of the Heart. Mystery and simplicity. Norwegians. Re-somethinged 80s rock. Patrick showed it to me and I fell in love with him all over again.

More than this I cannot say.

(Okay, except that the guy stirring the pot looks like Tollund Man. But that's all.)*

Christian yahoos drive Jewish family out of southern Delaware:

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) lectures secularist liberals:

I’m thinking back to Tempe, Arizona, in 1968. Where, in fifth grade, I got to hear from the principal about how if I didn’t agree with the Pledge of Allegiance, I should go back to Russia where I belonged.

More from the good people of southern Delaware:

If Barack Obama wants to support Kenneth R. Stevens over Alex Dobrich, that’s his right, but he can do it without further support from me. I’ve had it with Sistah Souljah moments. No more.

1. While grocery shopping at the Fairway in Red Hook, notice the fish department's special: three dozen Little Neck steamer clams for $10. Feel brave, even though you've never cooked live bivalves before.

2. When it's time to make dinner, consult online recipes and discover that steamer clams need a minimum of two hours' soaking time in cold water with a cup of cornmeal thrown in. Bah. Start soaking them while Patrick makes up an interim snack of cheese, crackers, and olives.

3. Do further research while waiting. Discover that the iodized salt you threw into the soaking water may have killed your clams. Brood.

4. When it's getting on to two hours, start the actual recipe:

3-4 lbs. live steamers
3 tbsp. butter
1 small onion, chopped
3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 bottle white wine
1/4 tsp. red pepper flakes
thick slices of French bread
enough melted butter

Thoroughly wash your clams.

Melt the 3 tbsp. butter in a good pan (tall is better than shallow) and cook the onions and garlic in it until soft. Pour in the entire bottle of wine and add the pepper flakes. Bring to a boil. Add the clams. Slap on a lid and set the timer for ten minutes. (It's supposed to take five to ten minutes for the clams to cook.)

5. At ten minutes, take the lid off and discover that none of the clams have opened. Despair. Announce that you must have killed them with that iodized salt. On general principles, set the timer for five more minutes and replace the lid.

6. When the timer beeps, take the lid off and find the clams have opened. Joy! Summon spouse. Remove the clams from the pot with a slotted spoon, and strain the broth through a fine strainer.

7. Ignore the broth. Ignore the bread. Eat the clams while standing up at the kitchen counter. Procedure: remove clam from shell. Dip in butter. Eat. Emit faint moan. Discard shell. Discard, uneaten, any clams that have failed to open.

8. Pack up and refrigerate the clam broth, promising to eat it later.

A startlingly well-preserved psalter dating from C.E. 800-1000 has turned up in an Irish bog. Man of the hour: the keen-eyed backhoe operator who spotted the psalter and stopped digging in time to preserve it.

It's a hell of a find. Here's another version of the story.

The National Geographic online has pitched in to say the discovery isn't a portent of the imminent arrival of Armageddon, either. It's nice to get that cleared up. Of course, the fact that it's necessary to get that cleared up is enough to make you beat your head against a wall.

Welcome back to Environmental Emergencies Theatre. In our last thrilling episode we saw Hypothermia.

It’s summertime now, so it’s time to talk about Heat Stress, aka Hyperthermia. Hyperthermia, like her twin sister Hypo, can kill you deader’n dirt by this time tomorrow.

We do best when our core temperature is within one degree either way of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius). Below that, you’re into hypothermia. Above it, you have hyperthermia.

We generate heat all the time (the fancy name for this is “thermogenesis”) via three basic means. One is thermoregulatory thermogenesis, which is the endocrine system and the central nervous system working together to control the rate of cellular metabolism. The second kind is work-related thermogenesis: when the skeletal muscles contract, they throw off heat as a byproduct. The third kind is diet-related thermogenesis: heat generated by chemical bonds being broken, and complex sugars and proteins being reduced to simpler molecules, as we digest our food.

The name for keeping the interior environment of our body within certain narrow limits (pH, salinity, and so on) is homeostasis. The human body has several systems that are tasked with maintaining our internal temperature. It’s a mammal thing. We regulate our internal temperature by internal means so we don’t have to crawl into cracks or sun ourselves on rocks.

Regardless of the exact origin of the heat in the body, it has to go somewhere, because the body is very heat-sensitive. Even when it’s forty below and we’re wearing our parkas, we still need to bleed off excess heat. All we’re doing is controlling the rate. If the core body temperature hits around 105 degrees Farenheit, the proteins in the brain start to denature, and within ten to fifteen minutes … you’re in deep, deep trouble.

Convection is carrying away heat through the motion of a fluid over a surface (the fluid is warmed, expands, rises, and is replaced with cooler fluid). Conduction is carrying away heat through direct contact with a cooler object. Radiation is the direct loss of heat as infrared radiation. And evaporative cooling is using the latent heat of evaporation to cool things — it takes energy to move water from its liquid form to its vapor form at the same temperature.

As the core temperature of the body rises, the hypothalamus (it’s under the thalamus at the base of the brain) senses the rise both directly from the blood that’s moving by it, and remotely from temperatures sensors in the extremities and in the great vessels in the chest. The hypothalamus stops producing the hormones that stimulate cellular metabolism, and instead starts dilating the blood vessels (vasodilation) near the surface of the skin and stimulating persperation.

The skin grows flushed, and wet. With the vasodilation in the skin and subcutaneous tissues, the skin gets hotter, which leads to more convective cooling and radiant cooling. The sweat evaporates, carrying away heat as liquid turns to vapor. The newly-cooled blood goes back into the core. All’s well.

That’s if things are working right.

The very young and the very old have a harder time dealing with heat stress. They have less-responsive thermoregulating systems, and have a lower tolerance to variations in core temperature. Folks with diabetes may have suffered damage to the parts of the autonomic nervous system that provide feedback to the hypothalamus, and may have nervous system damage that interfers with vasodilation and sweating. Some drugs, notably diuretics, beta blockers, and vasopressors, interfer with vasodilation and sweating. Antihistamines, and some psychotropics, can interfer with the central nervous system’s thermoregulation.

High humidity can interfere with evaporative cooling. High environmental temperatures and lack of ventilation can interfere with convective and radiant cooling. High heat, high humidity, and poor ventillation is the trifecta. Make it an elderly diabetic in a non-air-conditioned apartment where the windows don’t open, and it’s 9-1-1 time.

So, we’re now in the Land of When Things Go Wrong.

First up is heat cramps. The main causes of heat cramps are dehydration and loss of electrolytes (especially sodium). Sweat not only takes water out of the body, it takes out salt. You usually see heat cramps in folks who are working in a hot environment: work-related thermogenesis leading to vasodilation and sweating, leading to dehydration and hyponatremia. Heat cramps usually show up in the extremities (especially legs) and abdomen. This is nature’s way of telling you to stop exercising when it’s that hot out.

What to do about it: get out of the hot environment, stop using your large muscles, drink water, replace electrolytes.

Next up: Heat exhaustion (AKA heat prostration and heat collapse). This is the most common heat-related injury, and its basic mechanism is the same as heat cramps. The basic causes are heat exposure, stress, and fatigue. (It doesn’t have to be particularly hot before heat exhaustion is a possibility — wearing multiple layers of clothing that limit the effectiveness of sweating will do the job just fine. So, if you’re out hiking, take off layers; when you stop to rest, put on layers.)

The signs and symptoms of heat exhaustion are:

• Dizziness, weakness, fainting, nausea, and headache.
• Onset while working in a high heat/high humidity/poor ventilation environment and sweating heavily. Infants, the elderly, and the unacclimated may experience onset at rest.
• Cold, clammy, skin; ashen pallor.
• Dry tongue; thirst.
• Vital signs within normal limits, although the pulse may be rapid and the diastolic blood pressure (that’s the bottom number; the pressure when the heart isn’t contracting) may be low.
• Normal or slightly elevated body temperature.

What to do about all this: Take off any excessive layers of clothing, particularly around the head and neck. Get out of the hot environment (say, into the back of a nice air-conditioned ambulance). Drink a liter or so of water (slowly, so nausea doesn’t develop). Loosen restrictive clothing, lie down with your feet up, and use a fan for cooling.

Usually the symptoms resolve within a half hour. You should get worried if the symptoms don’t start to resolve, if the core temperature stays elevated or increases, or if the patient starts to lose consciousness. Be very cautious with the very young, the very old, and folks with underlying medical conditions (e.g. diabetes, heart disease).

Heat exhaustion, like heat cramps, is caused by dehydration and loss of electrolytes.

Like heat cramps, heat exhaustion is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

Now comes the biggie: Heat stroke. This one will kill you, and kill you fast. When your brain is gone it’s game over, and that can take as little as ten to fifteen minutes from onset of symptoms.

In heat stroke your body has essentially given up on cooling. The hypothalamus is saying “See ya later.”

This is the one that kills kids who are locked in cars on sunny days. It kills old folks in poorly ventillated apartments during heat waves. It kills healthy thirty-year-old guys who are working in humid warehouses. It kills.

Most of your heatstroke patients aren’t sweating — the sweating mechanism has been overwhelmed. You may find ‘em with wet skins, though — because the sweat that was there before hasn’t dried off. Wipe ‘em down with a towel — if no new sweat forms, be very suspiscious. The patient can be going into heat stroke even if the sweat is still pouring off him. The main thing is the core temperature: 105, 106, higher.

Signs and symptoms:

• High body temperature.
• Decreased level of consciousness.
• Change in behavior.
• Not sweating in a hot environment.
• Skin may be red or pale, depending on whether vasodilation has shut down yet.
• Signs of shock: elevated heart rate and breathing; decreased blood pressure.

Not all of these signs and symptoms will be present in every case.

This one is a medical emergency. You have to act, right now. Your first and biggest objective is to lower the core temperature, and do it by any means available.

• Move the person out of the hot environment.
• Set air conditioning to maximum.
• Remove the patient’s clothing.
• Put cold packs on neck, armpits, groin.
• Cover the patient with wet sheets or towels, or spray a mist of water on him.
• Aggressively fan the patient, even if you can’t dampen the skin.
• While all this is going on, be on the phone to 9-1-1. Even if you save the brain you may not have saved the kidneys. This person needs to be in a hospital.

One minor caveat: Try not to put the patient into hypothermia. If he starts shivering he’s just going to build body temperature back up.

Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

Prevention, Ounce of

Stay out of high heat/high humidity environments, particularly if you aren’t acclimated to them. Shopping malls, office buildings, movie theaters, are all air conditioned. Try to be in one of them during the heat of the day. Crank your home air conditioning to 70 or lower. If you must be in a high heat/high humidity environment, try to limit your exposure to three hours or less.

Wearing a hat is the simplest thing you can do if you must be out-of-doors in a heat-stress environment. Without a hat the only things between your brain and a 10,000 degree thermonuclear furnace are a layer of thin bone, a layer of thin scalp, and a (perhap thinning) layer of hair. Carrying an umbrella or parasol isn’t a bad idea. Wear light-colored, loose-fitting, cotton clothing. Remove layers as necessary to allow sweat to dry on your skin.

A cool neck wrap, to keep the brain cool, can sometimes help (if the humidity is low enough to allow evaporation.

Try to avoid heavy meals (diet-related thermogenesis) and heavy physical labor (work-related thermogenesis) when it’s hot and humid. The siesta is a wonderful idea. So’s having the major meal of the day well after sundown.

Hydration. Water is your friend. How much water? Just like with hypothermia, drink water until your urine is frequent, copious, and clear. Drink water even if you aren’t thirsty. Line up eight to twelve half-liter bottles of water on your desk and drink one of them at the top of every hour.

This brings us to the subject of Water Intoxication. Every year you lose a frat pledge or two from this — being forced to drink large amounts of water over short periods. What happens is the electrolytes get washed out of the body, and Bad Stuff (like cardiac arrythmias) follow. So, drink your water over long periods of time, and keep up your salt intake. Pretzels, potato chips, lemonade, watermelon, bananas … but not salt pills. (Salt pills can rip your stomach and can send you into hypernatremia, which has its own constellation of not-fun signs and symptoms.)

As always, I am not a doctor and can neither diagnose nor prescribe. Nothing here is advice for your particular condition; it is presented for amusement only.

Please stay safe.

Copyright © 2006 by James D. Macdonald.

The death toll in California is up to 81, and the coroner's office in Fresno is stacking bodies two to a gurney. If the region gets rolling blackouts, as still seems possible, people will start dying faster.

I know Jim's writing something about hyperthermia, so I'll lay off my Arizonan rants about people (especially all these bleeping Northeasterners) not taking heat seriously.

As always, I'm haunted by the number of people in this country who think that George W. Bush & Co. is on their side, when there are so many clues to the contrary. Wrecking FEMA, for instance. Large-scale disasters can strike anywhere. Katrina hit a city that voted Democrat, but a major disaster could just as easily have hit a red state, and the response would have been just as inept. Bush didn't care. The election was over. He didn't need their votes any more.

And then, obviously, there's global warming. If the problem of greenhouse emissions isn't addressed soon, it's going to be like perpetually having a Katrina-magnitude disaster happening everywhere at once. We'll all get nailed, no matter how we voted.

Bush & Co. have been systematically lying about global warming, getting caught lying about it, lying about it again, getting denounced by the rest of the world, suppressing data, suppressing reports, suppressing scientists, refusing to take action on it on the grounds that it's not a big enough problem, refusing to take action on it on the grounds that it's such a big problem that there's no use doing anything about it, lying about it some more when they think no one's paying attention, and generally being grossly irresponsible about this extremely serious issue, ever since they got control of the White House.

This abuse of public policy is temporarily beneficial to a small handful of top guys at automobile, petroleum, and energy companies. Those are Bush & Co.'s real friends. The additional money they get to suck up as a result is a teeny fraction of the collective costs of global warming the rest of us will get stuck with. (Corruption is another thing most Americans don't get. They don't understand how insanely wasteful it is.) And while those costs are almost literally incalculable, suffering that comes with them will be far worse.

We'll all get nailed, one way or another.

It's no news that Republicans and other right-wingers have an “us and them” mentality. What perpetually leaves me shaking my head is that 98% of the people who vote for “us and them” think they're part of the “us” that benefits from Bush's policies—and they're dead wrong.

“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” — Robert Graves

From an article, Mothers Anonymous in New York magazine, about NYC women who hang out and talk on a moderated but anonymous bulletin board:

And yet it's not enough money. It's interesting hearing the privileged classes talk about themselves.

You know those computer viruses that take over a machine, then send out email with spoofed “from” addresses they've lifted from the owner's address book? Somewhere out there is an infected computer whose owner's address book has me in it. I've been getting reports of large numbers of forged emails going out with my name on them. They have suspicious attachments. Don't open them.

Click on the link for more detailed information:

In short, it's yet another bug that exploits bleeping Windows' bleeping vulnerabilities. It's well worth avoiding.

I missed China Miéville’s guest-of-honor interview at Readercon, but these comments reported by Matt Cheney seem to me dead on, as are Matt’s own remarks:

Tor’s absurdly talented art director Irene Gallo has a blog, already replete with good advice to aspiring SF and fantasy artists:

U.S. detainees to get Geneva rights. Terrific. Except, not really. Via Matthew Yglesias on Tapped, we see that the CIA’s worldwide gulag is entirely exempt from today’s ukase.

Just like yesterday, if our lords and masters decree it, you can be disappeared without trial and without recourse down a very deep hole. Yay, us.

Via Supergee: Evidently under the impression that the Onion piece “I’m Totally Psyched About This Abortion!” is for real, “Pete” of anti-abortion weblog March Together For Life delivers its author, “Miss Caroline Weber,” a stern talking-to.

Almost as funny: his subsequent attempt to recover.

“Not at all a feminist blog”, according to Feminist SF: The Blog.

“Covers big world politics and all kinds of other things, including Teresa’s fascination with knitting (in the subtitle) and other crafts.” Uh huh.

Commodorified, inspired by Vindaloo, has come to a conclusion:

It's pretty good. It has huge throbbing word counts, well-waxed cats, deadline panic, conscienceless quick fixes for lagging plots, issues about onomatopoeia (which it misspells), and of course features both dinosaurs and sodomy.

I haven't heard it performed, so I don't know whether it comes up to the standards of the Orstrilian Notional Anthem or other well-regarded songs of our tribe, but I'm looking forward to seeing Commodorified's music video of it on YouTube.

On Beyond Ritalin.

This weekend, in Burlington, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. Behind the jump: the Nielsen Haydens’ schedule of events.

If you're a Brit you already knew about this ages ago. So sue me.

Anyway, it's come to my attention that England has one of the world's all-time great kick-ass fight songs, “Vindaloo”. It may be the best new song for singing en masse by drunks since “Rosin the Bow” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Here are the lyrics, with helpful commentary. Here's the earnest and sober Wikipedia entry about it. And here are two amateur videos set to it—you have your pick of snippets of cheesy football animation or Final Fantasy game footage. Either will let you hear the song, which is good because just reading the lyrics won't tell you a lot.

The beauty part of this song is that it makes almost no sense. Mostly it just involves singing “na na na” over and over again, which is great because it's fun to sing, and it cuts out the part where you try to remember the lyrics and can't. If you're not singing “na na nah”, you're singing “vindaloo” to the same beat, or “na na nah vindaloo na na nah vindaloo”, which is also fun.

and (very important) the line everyone can agree on:

After which, everyone shouts “ENGLAND!” in unison, and then either the next verse starts or the cameraman falls over.