By min | August 13, 2013, 11:26 AM | Science| Link

August 12, 2013

SuperMegaSpeed Reviews

Captain Marvel #14 - The caveat that we're only reading the CM part of this crossover still applies, but i still don't feel like i'm missing anything. My concern about the ridiculous number of Kree sentries is allayed, at least, with the idea that Yon-Rogg has absorbed the powers of the Psyche-Magnitron, and that's a cool idea (although i'm at a minimum on the fence about Yon-Rogg returning after his death in 1969, and as a Carol Danvers villain). This is a conclusion so i can't expect much from a characterization angle and it does the job of finishing the story. I will say the impact of the conclusion is a bit ruined when you go from Carol Danvers sacrificing herself to defeat the bad guy and then immediately on the letters page an editorial note saying "No no! We didn't just kill Carol!". And then next issue is a tie-in with another crossover event that i'm not following. But forget all of that. Because really, the story here is irrelevant when you have this just atrociously ugly artwork. In one of the articles i linked to in my mad blogging spree today, it was mentioned how to Marvel's credit they really let the creative teams put their own imprint especially on the second-tier books, and this one was cited as an example. But the problem with that is that stylized art is by definition divisive. Min and i both liked the art by De Andrade prior to this crossover, but i know friend Wanyas hated it and he's not alone. And the people at that link liked Dexter Soy, who i hated. And i also really don't like the art by Scott Hepburn and Gerardo Sandoval in this issue. Ugly, messy looking panels. And inconsistent. How do you wind up with one artist drawing everything except pages 2, 12, 13, and 18? I keep hearing that Marvel wants Carol Danvers to be a top tier super-hero, and i totally support that. But you're not going to get that with art that drives away half your potential audience. A nice clean, even generic, house style would be much better than any of this (although i'd still like to see De Andrade somewhere).

Uncanny X-Force #9 - I have to be honest: i really just skimmed all of this until the last page when the rest of the team resurfaced. I don't know what the hell happened on this book. It went from me thinking it was ok although with a weird team composition to me actually deciding i liked it enough to try another book by the writer (Robot Avengers) to now wondering why the heck i'm still getting this.

Indestructible Hulk #11 - So plot, script, art for this issue - all good (actually the art is a bit weird in a few places - especially that scene where the Hulk's face is being pushed back by G-Force pressure, and also a few close-ups of Zarrko - but it's generally ok). But the implications of this story line are alarming. I didn't read Age of Ultron but i got the lowdown from friend Bob and friend Internet. And while i'm fairly certain if Marvel is using Age of Ultron to punch continuity it won't be happening in Hulk, i know Mark Waid wrote the epilogue to AU and if there are plans afoot (and it certainly seems like there could be), Waid probably know what they are and could be foreshadowing it here. But Zarrko talking about "the beginning of the end" and "chronarchists... taking advantage of broken-space-time, changing history where it shouldn't be changed -- and making those changes stick-- because now that time's unraveling they're powerful enough to reknit history to their whims" (all while showing the time-displaced Young X-Men) sure sounds like a description of Marvel editorial and "architects". As i've said before, what's alarming to me isn't that Marvel might do a reboot. It's the possibility of a stealth reboot that bothers me. In that link, i thought about it in the context of a third party farm out. But the idea that Marvel could use AU to just change history, affecting the canonicity of past stories, but (and especially) without saying exactly what changed, is a more dangerous possibility. This is also why i didn't like the Spidey Mephistoboot so much more than your garden variety retcon. Saying Alicia Masters was really a skrull for seven years sucks, but you can still read the stories and say ok, this is really a skrull, and maybe have to ignore a few thought balloons. Saying Spider-Man was never married means that many years of Spider-Man comics can't have happened as printed. And with this timestream manipulation, Marvel can basically say at any time that any story didn't happen as printed. I know i'm way overreacting to basically one issue of Hulk. We'll see where this goes. But it's definitely something i'm watching for.

FF #10 - Since i'm suspecting Marvel editorial + architects of shenanigans right now, seeing them as characters in a comic, especially acting dumbly about comics, is a lot less amusing than it was meant to be. And i never like these creator appearances anyway. Next we'll have the Impossible Man showing up (just kidding; i know he's gonna be in the next issue. *sigh*). If i can get over that, this was a fun issue. Glad to have Allred back. And of course this is exactly the sort of book where we should expect to see Marvel creators and the Impossible Man, so i signed up for this sort of thing when i started getting this book. I have seen a fuss online about the fact that Maximus is imprisoned here but out and about elsewhere in concurrently published books. Eddies in the timestream, my friends (and this is his couch).

...ok i have more to say about Maximus. I'm not reading New Avengers so i'm talking out of my ass here. But the standard response, and this goes back to like 1962 once the Human Torch had a solo series in Strange Tales, is that the books aren't taking place at the same time. Which is fine. But in 1962 (and 1982, etc.) you could be assured that eventually it would all fit together; you could figure out which appearance went where. Or the stories were inconsequential enough that it wouldn't matter. But take something like Maximus being in prison. He breaks out in this issue, and presumably it ends with him going back in. Probably never ties in to the fact that he's working as an advisor to Black Bolt in New Avengers. As i said, i'm talking out my ass in this particular case. But take the Punisher's recent crossover with the Avengers. It ended with him going to jail. At the same time, he's out and about in Thunderbolts #1 and gets recruited by the Red Hulk. Never any kind of tie-in or acknowledgement that he was in jail. So that's why there's a hubub out this and it's different than 1962. Sure we can assume that he escaped from jail and that's why he was free in Thunderbolts and the Red Hulk (an Avenger and agent of the government) decided to recruit him instead of sending him back. But we can assume anything! We could just sit here and make up our own stories and never have to buy any comics! I mean, the reason we're all in this is because we want to read stories about these characters, not make up our own!

Daredevil #29 - Just to use the word zeitgeist one more time today, i think this story is interesting in light of Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman. Nothing explicit. But a story about racists infiltrating a courtroom captures a certain zeitgeist in the air today. And i think Mark Waid handles it really well. I mean, it's still a comic book story. Obviously in real life the Ku Klux Klan isn't going to stage a mock trial and then have the judge shoot the defendant. Or subsequently get kicked in the face by a guy in spandex. And no, i don't think Waid is saying anything about the Zimmerman jury or even intentionally referencing that. But it's a story that takes advantage of stuff that is "out there". And it's well told, nicely drawn.

X-Factor #260 - I'm surprised to see an End Of book focusing solely on Polaris since she's a very recent addition to this incarnation of the team. I mean, it happened while i was reading! And i'm also surprised to see Peter David setting up a new X-Factor organization in this book. But i liked this. I mean, to be clear, i hate the idea that Polaris really is Magneto's daughter. And even if she is, she shouldn't really have any kind of familial bond with Quicksilver. Granted they were both teammates in a previous X-Factor incarnation, but i can't imagine that they think of themselves as being related. Which i guess is why they resolve their differences by punching each other. But i thought this was well written and enjoyable.

Iron Man #14 - Again, the Greg Land damage is minimized by the all robot/iron suit action. But i will not be lulled into a false sense of security to purchase the new Mighty Avengers book, no matter how much i love Monica Rambeau. Especially since it's being written by the relatively unknown Al Ewing. But we were talking about robots... Really enjoyed Death's Head and i hope that wasn't really the end of this incarnation of him. And Gillen has set up a nice scenario here. As long as we're not delving into (hopefully false) memories of Tony's father, this has been a relatively traditional (albeit slowly paced and with a heavy body count) story, and i'm enjoying it. Did i throw enough caveats into that? I am saying if the art wasn't by Greg Land, and the story moved a little faster, and it wasn't adding ridiculous retcons to Stark's past, and holy god did Tony Stark just fail to save the lives of an entire planet full of aliens?, this would be really enjoyable.

X-Men #3 - I have seen a lot of people that are unhappy with this. Paul O'Brien covers a lot of the complaints. And they're real. Certainly Karima Shapandar was given no introduction; i have no idea who she is and just understood that she was the innocent victim/host of Arkea; apparently knowing that she's a kind of cyborg was important. And i'm terrible with names so introducing both a Karima and an Arkea was confusing to me (can't these people have super-hero names?). And the conclusion, if that's what it was (Paul O'Brien speculates this is another "arc that isn't really an arc") was pretty anti-climactic. And there are smaller problems too, like apparently there's a conflict being set up between Rachel Summer's methods and Psylocke's that was barely developed. And inconsistencies about the baby, and a lack of acknowledgment of Jubilee's current vampire status. All true (although i'd be happy to see the vampire thing quickly swept under the rug). I'll also add the fact that Storm makes a really weird statement about how this random group of X-Men had better stick together until they are sure that Arkea is taken care of, which is just a weak justification for keeping these characters together. But even with all that taken into consideration, i'm just so happy to find a clearly written, nicely paced X-Men story with good characterization and great clean art. I'll accept all these other deficiencies if i can keep that. Not so sure if i can, though. Because i see Coipel is taking a break and then it's on to a tie-in with yet another event that i want nothing to do with (Battle of the Atom).

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 8:42 PM | Comics | Comments (3) | Link

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I can't tie this one back to comic books

This is Texas attorney general Greg Abbott, arguing that Texas' gerrymandering efforts are not racist:

DOJ's accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats. It is perfectly constitutional for a Republican-controlled legislature to make partisan districting decisions, even if there are incidental effects on minority voters who support Democratic candidates... The redistricting decisions of which DOJ complains were motivated by partisan rather than racial considerations, and the plaintiffs and DOJ have zero evidence to prove the contrary.

Better not let the anti-tanning bed tax people know that a policy that only incidentally targets a specific ethnicity is racist. But i love the defense slash admission. We're not racist, just hyper-partisan. Ok, whatever you want to call it. But why not just pass a law that says Democrats can't vote?

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 4:58 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link

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Zeitgeist movement alert

Digby (quoting Marcy Wheeler) says terrorism is out, hackers are in. Maybe after Infinity, the next Marvel event should be reinventing the Lethal Legion as an Anonymous style hacker group? Although i think Marvel might have a hard time identifying the good guys and the bad guys in the story. Certainly "twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years" sounds like a familiar stereotype. And the guy that Wheeler is quoting sounds like he is baiting these guys to attack, self-fulfilling prophecy style.

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 4:15 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage| Link

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The Archer solution

You have to work with me here because i'm building off the last two posts, so you need to read them first. But thinking about the problem raised by the crime chart in my previous post, the obvious response is "Just ignore it and have them fighting crime anyway". One thing i don't like about that is it perpetuates the myth that we really do have a high crime rate and therefore need to continue the wasteful war on drugs, stop & frisk, the death penalty, etc.. The other point is that i think it would just have a lot less resonance; writers want to connect with what people are thinking about (don't make me use the word "zeitgeist" twice in one day).

And yet, and yet... this bounces around in my head and connects with something else i've been thinking about. Min and i have been re-watching Archer recently, just because. And one thing i really like is the deliberate anachronism of having the Soviet Union and the KGB and the 80s era computers along with modern cellphones and cultural references and everything else. It's funny if you think about but it's not a central part of the show and you could ignore it if you wanted to. And i was thinking about how this might have worked just as well or maybe better than Marvel's sliding timescale solution. I know Archer is a comedy show, but again, it's not a central premise of the show. And it's basically what people mean when they say that Marvel should have just ignored the time problems instead of constantly revising their starting point.

So basically the characters with Cold War origins do indeed have their Cold War roots and we just don't mention that fact. Not saying that we should still have Commie villains (although.. why not?) but we could certainly have 1980s level crime waves and stuff like that. Especially as comics get more post-modern it's easier for the current readership to just accept stuff like that. But you wouldn't really have anyone mention the discrepancy except the likes of Deadpool or Impossible Man or She-Hulk in the right circumstances.

It's really no less ridiculous than the sliding timescale. Which also leads to the occasional tongue-in-cheek scene like this.

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 3:43 PM | Comics | Comments (5) | Link

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Unleaded gas: the greatest super-hero of all

TPM's post today, which pivots off of Eric Holder's mostly symbolic announcement regarding drug sentencing reform (symbolic because the Federal government isn't doing the majority of drug prosecutions), reminded me of a topic related to my (surprise!) post below about Marvel comics. Whenever we're faced with these year-long uber plotlines in comics, one of us will say, only half-jokingly, "How come super-villains don't just rob banks anymore?". And the answer is in this chart:

That's the murder rate, but you'll find it's the same for most kinds of violent and semi-violent (e.g. burglary) crime. Josh Marshall kind of brushes past it, but the one theory that really holds up in terms of why this is happening is the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. But regardless of why, the fact is that crime-fighting super-heroes seem a lot less necessary than they used to. Certainly since the height of the Frank Miller 80s. But rising and then high crime rates track pretty well to the explosion of Silver Age super-heroes. And since the 90s it's become less and less of a thing, and it's really plummeting, even in the face of some pretty bad economic downturns. So what's a crime-fighting genre to do?

Well the X-books specifically have gotten a lot of mileage from civil rights, but (while i certainly don't want to declare victory!) we've had some improvements on that front and we're at a point where it's a lot harder to imagine a future of minority-hunting killer robots. And with Civil War and Dark Reign, Marvel wrung a lot out of the post-911 world, which i think was a good move thematically even if it wasn't executed well. And the Avengers movie (and also the Iron Man movies, even more directly) got a lot out of 911/terrorism itself. But with all these things we're moving away from the core raison d'etre (to type a phrase i would never use in real life) for super-heroes. So there's a lot less of Spider-Man mostly fighting criminals and then getting pulled into Secret Wars on occasion. It's got to be mostly Secret Wars and villains with world-threatening schemes or at least personal vendetta schemes. And that leads to event fatigue and just this sense that Marvel has strayed from that classic comics feel. And there may be nothing that Marvel can do about it, except lurch from event to event hoping to glom on to the latest zeitgeist.

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 3:10 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage| Link

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I guess the good news is we can follow along at home just by reading plot outlines

A while back i talked about this post at The Hurting where Tim O'Neil made the eye-opening but obvious in retrospect point that Marvel's events nowadays are basically planned as "a set of bullet points put together to clear out eight years' worth of dead-wood continuity problems". At the time he was referring to AvX. I looked at that and thought it rang true and helped explain why so many of these events seem so bad - they are planned by committee and a lot of the development for the story really just happens in the editors and writers' heads and the stories are just pushed through with brute force.

About a month ago, O'Neil put out another post about Age of Ultron, and writes:

Now, I want to stress that this was a momentary feeling - really, only a few seconds hesitation - but I was nonetheless attracted to the idea of Bendis as a high-powered surgeon who comes in, performs a high-pressure operation, and then leaves before the nurses begin the actual process of cleaning up the mess. When you view these things less as stories (which they aren't, not really) and more like spearheads for publishing initiatives (which they are, truly), the metaphor makes a lot of sense: Age of Ultron is messy, yes, but the idea is that it spawns a couple series and changes the direction of a few more books. People get excited so maybe they order a few more copies than they otherwise would of whichever books are spinning out of the event. New series that don't have a blockbuster creative team or popular premise need all the help they can get in this market, after all. The stories at the heart of the events are moot. They need to exist because the company has a need to earn a certain amount of money every fiscal quarter and major events are a guaranteed draw, but the quality or lack thereof is really besides the point.

All of which means, on a profound level, that the events in and of themselves don't really matter that much anymore. Sure, some events have had more lasting consequences than others, and to Marvel's "credit" they've done a good job of actually making these events "count." I put both of those words in the operational scare quotes for a good reason. House of M, Civil War, and Secret Invasion all had long-lasting consequences, and successfully changed the direction of the line for years to come. Everyone knows, everyone always knows, that everything will revert back to normal eventually, but Marvel has done a good job of playing these events in such a way that they actually do have consequences. The problem is that they've done too good a job here, in such a way as to alienate those readers who don't care about line-wide continuity repercussions and don't like their favorite characters having to participate in rolling crossovers every other month. ("Rolling crossovers" is roughly analogous to "rolling blackouts" in this context.) Dark Reign actually inspired a handful of fun stories, but woe betide any reader who was uninterested in Norman Osborne ruling the world and just wanted to read, say, a normal Avengers story during that period.

The bit about the surgeon comes from here, where Carla Hoffman at CBR writes:

Brian Michael Bendis is an incredible surgeon of event storytelling, and Age of Ultron #10 leaves stitches and scissors all over the reader's chest. I can't even say I'm surprised, nor can I really confirm that this is a "bad thing." There's no value judgment here: Age of Ultron needed to get to point B, it got there after 10 issues, and point C is going to be handled by a variety of folks (including Bendis himself, but we'll get to that).

...

In Avengers Disassembled, we had a problem of a stagnant Avengers comic; the book wasn't selling well, it had fallen into something of a rut creatively... Bendis grabbed a pen and introduced a major shake-up to Earth's Mightiest Heroes, the repercussions of which still last to this day. Too many mutants around thanks to Grant Morrison's wild ride? Bendis surgically struck with House of M, and "No more mutants" continues to anger our heroes (despite that edict being rewritten in a semi-Bendis-directed AvX). We needed a common enemy, old characters back on the playing field and another big shake-up to the Marvel Universe. Bam, Secret Invasion, which led to Dark Reign and beyond. Each time there's a problem, Bendis will solve it in an eight- to 10-issue story arc, and then he's out of there.

Rarely has an event book under his steady hand had a clear, definitive ending. The Avengers disassembled because the Scarlet Witch went crazy. Why? That was left for nurse Allan Heinberg to flesh out more in Avengers: Children's Crusade. Now that there's no more mutants, what happens to the X-Men? Welcome to the entire direction of the X-titles handled by everyone but Bendis at the time. Secret Invasion just ended with Norman Osborn slaying the Skrull Queen. What's after that? Dark Reign, where more characters were just pushed into place until Siege, where they were pushed back out of place and Heroic Age could begin. It's like there's no period at the end of Bendis' event sentences; they just keep going and going, running one into the other until someone else gets their hands in there and puts in that full stop.

Age of Ultron #10 is the best example yet of this strange, never-ending story phenomenon... Just when the day is saved, there's ... I don't know. A time quake? A big two-page spread of time fracturing and a variety of characters shouting out while history or the future plays out in shaky cam behind them? Reed Richards, Tony Stark and Beast all get together to stroke their chins and not really know what happened either. Apparently, Wolverine's fool move was the last straw and time is officially pissed off at the Marvel Universe.

And that's the end. Yes, there are more pages, but those are short ads for the miniseries Hunger (where 616-Galactus will invade the Ultimate Universe), Avengers A.I. (as Hank Pym now knows what he did wrong and what he has to do) and Guardians of the Galaxy (where Angela and the reader will figure out how she got into the Marvel Universe).

So putting it all together, not only are these events just hitting bullet points decided upon by committee and without the development necessary to get them there, but they are not even complete stories in their own right, just setting up the next new status quo. And not even fully explaining that status quo, and leaving it for the writers of the regular issues to deal with in whatever way they see fit until the next event, which will ignore all that to hit the next planned bullet point. When this started, it all felt pretty cool. I'm interested in the bigger picture of the Marvel universe, so seeing these events like House of M and Civil War, and the Norman Osborn takeover after Secret Invasion all have dramatic medium term effects on the larger Marvel universe, instead of, say, everyone defeats the Beyonder/Thanos/Apocalypse/Whoever and then goes home and back to their regular business, was exactly the sort of thing that i wanted to see.

Except... it never went anywhere, it just sort of weirdly jumped to the next big thing, and all of the books in between felt like they weren't coordinated with the big story. It's all been a confusing mess. And as O'Neil and Hoffman are saying, it's really by design. Let's eliminate most of the mutants. No planned resolution to that. Let's have a schism among the heroes. Ok, enough of that, let's have Norman Osborn take over SHIELD. Ok, wrap that up and now let's bring back the mutants. And that all sounds really good at the bulletpoint level but the individual stories start off enthusiastically with each new status quo, but with no real plans (and the inability to make plans since the direction comes from the top), they then meander for a while and then suddenly jerk to the next thing.

So while O'Neil says the problem is that Marvel is forgetting the readers that don't care about line-wide continuity, weirdly (for me at least) it's not working at that level either. In fact, it's gotten to the point where i've retreated from the line-wide events and i'm mainly picking up the fringe titles that stay out of this stuff - Young Avengers, FF, Daredevil, Hulk (actually the most recent Hulk deals directly with the Age of Ultron fallout in away that is really alarming to me, but more on that in today's Speed Review). And that's not where i want to be. I want to be reading the mainstream Avengers and X titles and all the big events, but they've just gotten so awful that i'm not able to. And per these posts i'm quoting, it's less the "Bendis can't write team books" and "Hickman is tediously boring" type stuff and more that the books are actually designed to be this way right now.

By fnord12 | August 12, 2013, 12:46 PM | Comics| Link

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August 9, 2013

Oh Where, Oh Where

I can't find my piece of paper.
I should have been more careful with my piece of paper.
It isn't very often that this happens to me.
This is very important, fellas, can't you see?

By fnord12 | August 9, 2013, 11:02 PM | Music & My stupid life| Link

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Hormones in the water supply?

The obesity epidemic is reaching animals, too. Cats and dogs. Sewer rats. And even control mice used in experiments. As the study says (click through the link above for the PDF):

But these factors cannot account for the findings in the laboratory animals that are on highly controlled diets, which have varied minimally over the last several decades. These animals are typically fed ad libitum, so if weight increases are attributable to increases in food consumption (which is possible), it is difficult to understand why animals in controlled environ-ments on diets of constant composition are consuming more food today than in past decades.

The paper goes on:

One set of putative contributors to the human obesity epidemic is the collection of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (endocrine-disruptors), widely present in the environment. Another conceivable explanation is obesity of infectious origin. Infection with adenovirus-36 (AD36) leads to obesity in multiple experimental models and antibodies to AD36 are correlated with obesity in humans. These observations suggest that AD36 and conceivably other infectious agents could be contributing to obesity within populations. Other explanations may include epigenetic-mediated programming of growth and energy-allocation patterns owing to any number of environmental cues such as stressors, resource availability, release from predation or climate change.

Increased body weights among laboratory animals have implications for the outcomes and design of the experiments that use these animals. Among several laboratory animals, it is known that calorically restricted individuals live longer and obese animals have shorter lifespans. This has had implications for toxicology studies in which some researchers have shifted to controlling for reduced lifespan and increased body weight.

As the post i linked to says, caveats apply, but it's certainly interesting and maybe a little scary.

By fnord12 | August 9, 2013, 6:38 PM | Science| Link

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Everybody knows that a burrow owl lives in a hole in the ground

By fnord12 | August 9, 2013, 4:17 PM | Cute Things | Comments (4) | Link

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August 7, 2013

Let's take them at their word

Kevin Drum says, "it's August, and every blogger in the country is having a hard time finding anything to write about. So the Pew survey is getting lots of attention." But this survey is about extending life extension, and living forever is a life goal of mine, so this is more than just summer filler for me (if i have nothing to blog about i should be writing Team America reviews). Drum observes that the majority of correspondents say that the ideal life span is the current standard lifespan, and he doesn't believe them. Now, on the one hand, i don't want to scare scientists into thinking "Hey, we're working on this immortality stuff and the people don't even want it!". But on the other hand, every time the subject of life extension comes up, people start worrying about overpopulation. So if most people want to decline the life extension technology, that's fine with me.

By fnord12 | August 7, 2013, 4:31 PM | Science| Link

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I guess Washington DC is a idyllic city with the lowest crime rate in the nation

As Atrios says, you have to wonder who thought infiltrating student protest groups to protect shop owners from receiving letters was a good use of time and resources.

By fnord12 | August 7, 2013, 2:43 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link

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Therefore

An actual person elected to the (Federal!) government:

I had an Indian doctor in our office the other day, very dark skin, with two non-dark skin people, and I asked this to him, I said, 'Have you ever been to a tanning booth?' and he goes, 'No, no need.' So therefore it's a racist tax...

By fnord12 | August 7, 2013, 8:38 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2) | Link

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August 5, 2013

Petri Dish Burger

So i guess this is becoming more and more of a reality. They're doing it for all the same reasons i'm vegan; as the article says, "Breeding animals destined for the dinner table takes up about 70 percent of all agricultural land", and with that comes additional use of oil and water, major pollution (animal waste and fertilizer), etc.. Finding other sources of protein is a great way to reduce all that resource use.

I'm curious if this would be accepted any more than, say, soy burgers are, though. Anyone who's been vegan for the past 15 years or so (all six of us) knows that vegan burgers have come a long way. From burgers that tasted like dry newspapers to burgers that tasted like mushy newspapers to Boca patties and now Gardein, which as far as i'm concerned is amazing. So my first reaction to someone devoting all this R&D to growing burgers in a lab is "Why bother?". But i can also admit that being away from real meat for 15 years has moved the goal posts for me and someone going directly from real meat to Gardein is not likely to be as impressed.

One advantage these guys have is they recognize that you have to have some fat in the product. "Taste is the least (important) problem since this could be controlled by letting some of the stem cells develop into fat cells". One big problem with a lot of vegan products (not Gardein so much) is that they're also serving people who think that all fat is bad, and they're also afraid of salt, so you get these dry tasteless products. Again, it's gotten a lot better. But since hippies won't be the primary target market, the lab meat people can skip all of that.

But the question remains: will people eat this? I'm fairly certain i wouldn't, despite it really addressing all the problems i have with eating meat. The gross-out factor seems too high to me, but again, with 15 years away from meat there's an additional gross-out factor for me than there would be for a current meat eater. I did think this was a hilarious juxtaposition, though:

"I'm a vegetarian but I would be first in line to try this," said Jonathan Garlick, a stem cell researcher at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine in Boston. He has used similar techniques to make human skin but wasn't involved in the burger research.

The other possibility is that when this starts becoming mass produce-able (they're still a ways away from that) it could just start showing up in stores without any indication that it's different from other meat. That's already true of genetically modified vegetables so i don't think it's unlikely that the same might become true of lab produced meat.

By fnord12 | August 5, 2013, 9:06 AM | Science| Link

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August 2, 2013

Are We Programmed to Cooperate?

Are you familiar with the prisoner dilemma scenario? You and another person are "suspects" who are separated and each must choose to either inform on the other suspect or keep your mouth shut. The consequences of your decision are as follows:

1. If only one of you rats out the other, that person gets set free and the other guy gets 6 months.


2. If you both decide to rat on each other, you each get 3 months.


3. If you both keep your mouth shut, you both get 1 month.

You have no way of knowing what the other guy's going to do. What do you decide? From watching episodes of Law & Order, i know that the best thing for all parties is to keep your damn pie hole shut, despite the seemingly good return on being the first to spill the beans. And it seems like our genes feel the same way.

Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.

This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.

...

Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.

...

"You might think that natural selection should favour individuals that are exploitative and selfish, but in fact we now know after decades of research that this is an oversimplified view of things, particularly if you take into account the selfish gene feature of evolution.

"It's not individuals that have to survive, its genes, and genes just use individual organisms - animals or humans - as vehicles to propagate themselves."

"Selfish genes" therefore benefit from having co-operative organisms.

Now, here's where the possible programming to make us more likely to cooperate comes in.

[R]esearchers, who looked at a large sample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish "taking" behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless "giving" behavior.

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need." While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me, "Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy."

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"For our ancestors, loneliness and adversity were associated with bacterial infections from wounds with predators and fights with conspecifics." On the other hand, if you are doing well and having a lot of healthy social connections, your immune system shifts forward to prepare you for viruses, which you're more likely to contract if you're interacting with a lot of people.

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Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives -- proverbially, simply here for the party -- have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers.

...

People whose levels of happiness and meaning line up, and people who have a strong sense of meaning but are not necessarily happy, showed a deactivation of the adversity stress response. Their bodies were not preparing them for the bacterial infections that we get when we are alone or in trouble, but for the viral infections we get when surrounded by a lot of other people.

According to the first article, cooperating ensured our genes surviving. Did our genes basically make it more likely that we'd choose to cooperate and help others by making us feel physically better if we did? And poorly if we chose to be selfish, triggering a response in our bodies as if we were "enduring chronic adversity", as noted in the second article?

Looking at our modern society, i believe the threat of heart disease, cancer, and depression is no longer an effective deterrent to being selfish, not in the face of immediate, euphoric gratification.

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy...They think that they're smart, and that the rest of us are dumb.
-- Yossarian, Catch-22

By min | August 2, 2013, 3:24 PM | Science| Link

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What's the sweet spot?

It really is a marvelous accomplishment to be able to argue that making $250,000 a year is not rich when we're talking about taxes but say that people are greedy for wanting to increase minimum wage when that's the topic.

Click on that second link if you want to see how Neil Cavuto doesn't understand that the $2/hour he made when he was 16 was more than what minimum wage is today after inflation (let alone the fact that the median fast food worker today is an adult with families to feed, not 16 year old kids looking for spending money).

Cavuto's job is to confuse and anger old people, and i don't know if he really believes what he's saying or he's just doing what he was hired to do, but either way it really is impressive how they are able to just push out any message they want regardless of logical inconsistencies.

By fnord12 | August 2, 2013, 2:44 PM | Liberal Outrage| Link

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Further Study on Farms and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Link

Beginning in January 2012, Smith and her research assistant, Dipendra Thapaliya, spent a year collecting weekly swabs and meat samples from local grocery stores, including this one. They found S. aureus on nearly every type of surface. Five per cent of grocery carts carried MRSA. Of meat samples, 30% harboured S. aureus, 11% had S. aureus resistant to multiple antibiotics and 3% carried MRSA. The data, which have not been published, also showed that pork products had some of the highest levels of MRSA, whereas meat labelled 'antibiotic free' had little or none. This mirrors what Smith and her colleagues found in samples from farms across the state.

Now i have remember to wipe down the shopping cart when i go to the supermarket.

By min | August 2, 2013, 12:24 PM | Science| Link

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My God, It's True!

Sheriff Matt Warren: Did you know, Putnam, more people are murdered at ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once - lower temperatures, people are easy-going. Over ninety two, it's too hot to move. But just ninety-two, people get irritable. -- It Came From Outer Space (1953)

I totally thought they'd just made that up cause this movie was not exactly big on scientific facts. Shows what i know. Link

The researchers found that a temperature rise of one standard deviation -- which, in the United States today, occurs when the average temperature for a given month is about 3° Celsius higher than usual -- increases the frequency of interpersonal violence by 4%, and the risk of intergroup conflict, such as civil war or rioting, by 14%.

Ofc, further down the article, the conclusions made by this study are contradicted. But still, you should watch out for trails of glitter mysteriously leading to your closet. Might be aliens.

A 3°C change is about equal to 5.4°F

By min | August 2, 2013, 11:38 AM | Movies & Science| Link

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August 1, 2013

Caution, caution

Update: This turned out to basically be a non-story. What happened was a company noticed that an employee that they had just let go was searching for phrases like "pressure cooker bombs" from his work computer, which is something the company was able to see, and they notified the police (which i think was probably a good idea!). What's disappointing is how many liberal blogs (Digby, Daily Kos, even Kevin Drum to a lesser degree) jumped on this and immediately assumed it was an NSA issue.

Original post below...

Articles referencing this story are making the rounds. Here's the Atlantic.

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

If true, holy crap. But it's all a little weird. First, it seems like things have progressed way beyond what even Snowden's leaks have revealed. Second, the Atlantic wasn't able to get confirmation from any law enforcement agency that they were responsible (again, if true, that's part of the story). Third, take a look at the original poster's website. She's a professional writer and her site is full of strange stories told in the first person.

I would be very careful about assuming this is true until it's better confirmed.

By fnord12 | August 1, 2013, 7:06 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1) | Link

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The "Operators" of Captain "O"

Here's Captain "O".

When the accident that transformed Oliver Olympic into Captain "O" also killed his wife Ruth, he used his newly gained power to manipulate children into extorting money from their parents and their parents' friends to create clones of Ruth to become his "Operators".

Here is the only surviving photo of Ruth. Note the lack of a crown or lightning bolt shirt. She can be considered the "Eve" of Captain "O"'s cloned operator entourage.

And here are the "Operator" clones.

Why i felt the need to share this with you is known only to me, but if you would like to know more, leave a comment and ask for fnord. He or another SuperMegaMonkey operator is waiting to respond.

By fnord12 | August 1, 2013, 1:44 PM | Comics | Comments (1) | Link

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Binge Consuming

Just wanted to note these comments from Tom Brevoort in light of my mention of the missing Ron Garney, Alan Davis, and Mike Allred in my Speed Review.

The first is about Age of Ultron and the upcoming Infinity having multiple artists:

I prefer to have a single consistent creative team. But given what we've learned about how much more successful Event series are when they ship more often than once a month, there simply aren't many artists who can work at that speed and still maintain the kind of quality that you'd want. So it's a necessity...

And the second about regular books:

The art matters to us a great deal, the whole package matters to us. But the manner in which the audience likes to consume entertainment is changing--what's come to be known as "binge consuming." That means that we do better if the books ship more often than once a month, and that's an almost impossible schedule for any artist to handle.

There have always been fill-ins. And one good thing about Marvel NOW! is that they acknowledge that there are going to be fill-ins and so they plan for it, dividing the artist switches into arcs (although in the cases of both Uncanny X-Force and Wolverine, those "arcs" are very artificial). But this idea of "binge consuming" sounds a lot more like "get as many books out as possible before the reviews come in" and it doesn't seem like it bodes well for the long term.

By fnord12 | August 1, 2013, 1:20 PM | Comics| Link

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SuperMegaSpeed Reviews

Uncanny Avengers #10 - At least there was some fighting in this issue. But we've already made the decision to drop this, and opening with Rogue's complaints about Captain America didn't help convince me otherwise. Nor did Wonder Man comparing himself to Gandhi. Or Thor hitting someone on the head while saying "I have a priority delivery for you... *grok!* Get up. You need to sign that you received it." I still hold out hope that this will all read better when it's read in a single sitting, so all this protracted mutant/non-mutant griping is resolved and everybody makes nicey nicey in a single day instead of over this interminable period of months and months.

Is this what we're doing with Wolverine's claws now? All that blood? I'm hoping this isn't a nod to what's going on in the Wolverine book where he's lost his powers. So i assume the idea is that because when Wolverine pops his claws it breaks the skin so there should be lots of blood. Funny how we never saw it before.

Uncanny X-Force #8 - What happened here? There was a story about the Demon Bear, and there were characters like Puck and Spiral, and there was art by Ron Garney. And now that's all just been... discarded in favor of this Psylocke/Fantomex story that keeps jumping around between the past and the present with no warning? I'm still not sure how Psylocke gets from being in prison with Cluster to sitting and having champagne with Weapon XIII. It's interruptions within interruptions. This whole series seems to have been designed with an overambitious structure in mind that the artist (at least) isn't capable of pulling off. I don't know if it's writing for the trade mentality or what but with stories already decompressed you can't just leave them dangling for months and months. Very strange.

X-Factor #259 - Cute resolution to the question of Longshot and Shatterstar's origins. I'll have to defer the analysis on whether it really fits. But this was more satisfying than the previous End Of installments.

Iron Man #13 - Grah! Greg Land is back! I thought we were safe at least until the end of the Secret Origin of Tony Stark storyline. Actually, though, since this is mostly a story with robots, Land's damage is limited to those shots of Iron Man with his faceplate pulled up. Beyond that, the fact that this story focused on Death's Head and didn't add any more revisions to Tony's parents made it more enjoyable.

Wolverine #7 - Man, Wolverine sinks into a depression right quick, huh? We know he hasn't been that long without his powers because he has his first drink here. But he's already become terrified of shaving, cars, etc.. I think it's an interesting thing to explore (and i appreciate the acknowledgement that it's been done before); it just happens super quick. I guess i shouldn't complain about a compressed story after some of my previous comments today. And anyway, Alan Davis is back next issue (for a new "arc"; same as the old arc). Paul Cornell writes a much better Thor than Rick Remender, that's for sure.

FF #9 - Honestly, this is a comic that should be delayed instead of having fill-in artists. Especially a pool party issue. But if you're going to have a fill-in artist, let him draw in his own style. A fill-in artist attempting to mimic Mike Allred, with colors by Laura Allred, and you're just begging for negative comparisons.

Young Avengers #8 - Great stuff. Innovative art. Nice character interactions. Hilarious scripting. Fun plot. In the interest of promoting the book, i'd screenshot Loki shouting "I hate you, inevitable horrible!" and the Demiurge, but i don't want to spoil anything for min.

By fnord12 | August 1, 2013, 12:31 PM | Comics | Comments (3) | Link

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Time to Stop Accepting Online Misogyny

I've been pretty certain all my life that's it's not ok to tell someone you hope they get cancer and die. I've also been pretty sure my entire adult life that it's not ok to walk up to someone and threaten to rape them because they held an opinion contrary to your own. That if such a thing should occur, that person would be reported to the police for making a threat.

I apparently never got the memo that if you do it on the internet, it's ok. It's ok to threaten a woman with rape for wanting Jane Austen's picture to be on currency, or making a video about female stereotypes in video games, or doing well at a Magic tournament. You ladies should quit being so sensitive. Women!

It's so prevalent that women who receive these threats accept it as a normal course of events and don't bother reporting it. Just ignore the trolls.

Freeman, whose latest column How to use the internet without being a total loser addressed the issue of misogynistic online abuse, said: "I get loads of abuse on Twitter. That I should just 'go back to the kitchen', or someone saying they can't wait until women lose the vote.

"Because of the bomb threat this time I called the police. There was that guy arrested for threatening to blow up an airport. If it's illegal to threaten to bomb an airport, it's illegal to threaten to bomb me."

Despite having received rape threats in the past, she only felt the need to report the bomb threat. The problem with that is it creates an atmosphere of tacit approval. So the douchebag misogynists feel no qualms about continuing with their behavior, becoming bolder, threatening to blow women up for supporting a campaign to put a woman on the pound note. I can't emphasize enough how insane that is.

Well, hopefully, they've finally gone too far with this bomb threat. Hopefully, more and more women will feel they are justified in reporting death threats, rape threats, general harassment, etc., and the online community will continue to be less and less tolerant of it.

Having occasionally been stupid enough to read the comments section of articles, i doubt it. But i still hope it.

By min | August 1, 2013, 11:01 AM | Liberal Outrage| Link

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Waiting for Quasar

John Seavey at MightyGodKing has a nice regular feature called Things I Love About Comics that is meant as a balance to his natural impulse to complain about comics (sounds familiar). His subject for this installment is Quasar. And it's nicely timed because now that i am on the home stretch of my back issue add, i'm looking forward to adding new years again, and one of the books i am anticipating is Quasar. But it'll still be a while before i get to Quasar (which begins in 1989), so that's why i'm writing this here and now.

It's actually surprising to me that i'm looking forward to Quasar. I do own nearly the entire series already (and i'll fill in whatever i'm missing before i get to the applicable years), but it was never a favorite of mine. Not even close. I dislike Quasar the character. His powers are too derivative of the Green Lantern, and his personality is (deliberately) a whitebread by-the-books stuffed shirt. Works well in a group situation, but not very interesting as a solo character. And i already have Captain America for that. I'm also not a big fan of Mark Gruenwald's writing. I think as an editor, or as a sort of plot inspiration guy, there was no one better. But i find his writing very flat and often marred by his goofy appreciation for DC Silver Age stuff.

That said, i love his appreciation for the continuity of Marvel's shared universe. And as John Seavey notes, Quasar was the book where he really went crazy exploring that continuity:

I loved the series because Gruenwald looked at the Marvel Universe, the grand patchwork creation of hundreds if not thousands of hands, and saw infinite vistas to explore. Tiny little loose ends that most other fans forgot about... he saw as a chance to tell a story that was waiting for someone to do it justice. Forgotten characters like the Stranger or Maelstrom were interesting and compelling when seen through his eyes, and he couldn't wait to show you why.

...

All sorts of weird, crazy, goofy concepts that went to the forgotten corners of the Marvel Universe and brought back all sorts of treasures to share.

...

For all that pedantry can (and does) devolve into pointless point-scoring and petty bitching over "getting it wrong", there's a flipside to it. There's a way of caring about these things that's positive, that uses the questions of how the Marvel Universe works as a springboard to inspiration. Mark Gruenwald wrote from his passions as a fan his whole career, and 'Quasar' showed exactly why that was something to love.

Now, as i said, i already own, and have read, most of the series. But the way it went was i probably bought the first dozen or so issues in real time, and then just bought any issues that crossed-over into "events", and then filled in the gaps from the bargain bins much later. And more to the point, i was coming in from the perspective that i got into comics reading Roger Stern's Avengers and John Byrne's FF and other books from that period and so i obviously knew everything there was to know about the Marvel universe, and all the loose ends and weird corners Gruenwald was exploring were unknown to me and so that aspect of the series would have been over my head. Which would have made Gruenwald's plots just seem weird to me instead of explaining past weirdness.

But what's happened since then is that almost every time i'll review a comic that features a dangling plotline or a strange seemingly one-off character, someone will leave a comment saying "That gets wrapped up in Quasar" or "This guy appears again in Quasar". And that's really built up my anticipation. In some cases i already knew it, but often not because with my backissue adds i'm reading the source stories for the first time. The point is that a scene like the one below is going to have a lot more impact on me now after my work on the Timeline than it would have in 1990.

Now i still don't expect to love the series from a "craft" point of view for the reasons i mentioned above. And this is where i wish that Gruenwald was editing/guiding the series and Roger Stern had been writing it (of course, i'd read Roger Stern writing the Blue Shield and love it). But this is where we get into that weird distinction i make between a comic being "good" and a comic being a fun addition to the Marvel universe.

Thinking about my other objection - to the character of Quasar - i started wondering if basically a series like this had to have a straight-laced character as the lead. Someone has to play the straight man in the world of weird. When Dan Slott did something vaguely along these lines in She-Hulk, for example, it came across as pure satire and was more dismissive than reverential about continuity, and that's not what i'm looking for. So maybe it had to be a character like Quasar.

But then i thought... why not do this with the Fantastic Four? You've got a great combination of characters there - Mr. Fantastic can be completely straight-laced while the Thing can goof on everything, with the Invisible Woman and Human Torch playing more moderate roles. And it plays right into their theme of being Imaginauts. And the Fantastic Four book has really been directionless for a loooooong time. Now i know past writers have attempted the "explorers" route or brought in random elements of the Marvel universe (i'm thinking of Hickman's use of Dire Wraiths and Kymellians and such), but it's usually in a way that's superficial, and more to the point, as a means to create new stories. And as weird as it may sound, i'm looking for something more subtractive. Tie up loose ends. Explain other stories that didn't make a lot of sense (Bendis' Secret Wars II retcon?). Basically turn Fantastic Four into what Quasar was - the Marvel Continuity Clean-up book.

Now before you say that it wouldn't sell, consider that "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine" is already sitting at an embarrassing #60 on the sales charts. This is a book that used to be Marvel's flagship title but it's been in the doldrums for years; decades, even. Marvel can't cancel the title because of its significance, but at the same time it's perceived as being a traditional, old fogey sort of title. So why not just embrace that and do it whole hog? There are still enough of us traditional, old fogey sort of fans out there (in fact, it's probably a larger part of Marvel's audience than they'd care to admit) that would buy the book and if it created a positive buzz from us cranks it might even climb up the charts a bit. If not, you haven't lost anything. And include copious annotations that refer to trades people can buy to see what original stories the FF are "investigating" and you've got an instant sales tool.

Anyway, don't know how i got off on the Fantastic Four. Looking forward to reading Quasar is the point.

By fnord12 | August 1, 2013, 10:46 AM | Comics | Comments (6) | Link

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They Got Me By Mentioning D&D

Gold hoarders are funny. Link

Would gold really pay off in the event of a calamitous social disruption? I'm really not sure that it would.

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First of all, gold has always had a lot of limitations as a medium of exchange. Most notably, it is relatively easy to steal. To realize this, all you have to do is look at games like World of Warcraft, Diablo, Dungeons and Dragons, or the original Final Fantasy. In those games, gold is the money, and you often get gold not by doing an honest day's work, but by running around and beating people up and taking their gold. In other words, the entire world of modern fantasy role-playing is a subtle joke on gold's unsuitability as a medium of exchange.

I object to that. There's nothing wrong with beating people up and taking their gold. Some of them deserved it. They were trying to destroy Chumera. But without a magic mirror that holds all your shit, you're gonna end up over-encumbered and then your movement's going to get decreased to 6 and then just forget about getting into the fight before it's all over.

But cereally. If the world sinks into a financial apocalypse (probability of that happening increases if Larry Summers gets put in charge of the Fed, btw) and governments become unstable, what the hell good is gold going to do you? Food, clothes, medical supplies - that's what will be the new currency.

In the days when people carried around gold doubloons and whatnot as money, you had a global political system characterized by pockets of stability (the Spanish Empire, or the Chinese Empire, or whatever) scattered among large areas of anarchy. Those stable centers minted and gave out the gold coins. But in the event of a massive modern global catastrophe that brought widespread anarchy, the gold bars buried in your backyard would not be swappable for eggs or butter at the corner store. You'd need some big organization to turn the gold bars into coins of standard weights and purity. And that big organization is not going to do that for you as a free service. More likely, that big organization will simply kill you and take your gold bars, Dungeons and Dragons style.

By min | August 1, 2013, 10:27 AM | D&D| Link

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