How To Spot A Psychopath

Herewith, selected thoughts on finally getting around to watch “Doomsday“. It’s Neil Marshall’s third big movie; he also did The Descent and Dog Soldiers.

In brief: Yes, this is indeed total nonsense, but awesome!

Some minor spoilers follow.

Righto, I’m watching a plague movie. Mmm, splatter!

Oh, no - this is Escape from New York, obviously.

I suppose if everything’s going to hell, it’s not a bad idea to have a genetically enhanced Prime Minister. (Could be better, could be worse.)

No, wait - now I’m watching Aliens.

No, no, hang on - it’s Beyond Thunderdome. Leathers and feathers all over the shop.

I don’t care what you say - I’ll put Scottish post-apocalyptic lunatics up against the post-apocalyptic lunatics of any other nation you care to name.

When you see a bloke with a big dangly punk face decoration and you think, “you’re not living in a society where hanging a handle off your face is a good idea, mate”, and later on you’re proven to be exactly right? Nice.

Honestly, I could go a bit of long pig right now. Yum.

As long as you’re not trying to make Great Art, casting stunt-people in primary roles is an excellent idea.

OK, I’m officially shutting down my Nitpicking Cortex now. What I just saw were special post-apocalypse trail bikes, which are completely inaudible until they’re six feet behind you. And it turns out to take about three seconds to get a steam locomotive going. And it’s been a generation since anybody around here saw a dentist, but they’ve all got great teeth. And nobody knows how to make a crystal radio any more. And spy satellites will only spot the occasional individual wandering around, even if giant open-air cannibal raves are happening every night.

OK, really stopping with the nitpicks now.

Right, that’s it, this whole movie has just been made worthwhile by its inclusion of a Flanders and Swann reference! “PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS EATEN PEOPLE“!

Craig Conway’s deranged yelling skills were clearly wasted when he was a mere, short-lived, “Camper” in Dog Soldiers.

I often, while watching movies, say “there’s something you don’t see every day”. It’s great when someone on-screen says it too.

“Gift Shop” is hilarious.

Remember - when you hire Tim Curry, Brian Blessed or Malcolm McDowell, you get the beard for free!

Tough guys don’t use Desert Eagles. They use Webleys.

I just saw a man get knocked out with a pheasant.

Since we all know fighter jets will still be functional after a thousand years of neglect, 25 years for a footballers’ car is obviously no problem at all.

Good lord, now we’re back to Mad Max again, except with a Frankie soundtrack. And there’s a spiky Mark II Jag. And a black cab.

I’m surprised that this is the first time something exploded when it crashed. Oh, and there’s the second time.

Ooh, that’ll be the third.

Seven out of ten.

These guys remind me of someone.

And also remind me that I must get around to building that Thingamakit I bought the other day.

(Via.)

The Metafilter thread about Michael Crichton’s unexpected death is less respectful than most death-threads there.

Which is, of course, no big deal. Someone always says “show a little respect, you wouldn’t act like this at the guy’s funeral” when obituary-thread commenters not only omit the traditional moment-of-silence dot, but even say bad things about the deceased.

But Crichton’s grieving family are probably not frantically refreshing Metafilter right now. And MeFi users are, overall, pretty enthusiastic about the advancement of human knowledge. And Michael Crichton did human knowledge a few significant injuries, especially with his later books.

A lot of commenters said they loved Crichton’s books when they were kids. I bet I would have, too, but I think I just didn’t read any. Maybe The Andromeda Strain, but I’m not sure.

I’m glad only the earlier, less anti-science ones would have been available then, though.

That’s because I read State of Fear as an adult, and the only part of it that seemed obviously stupid at the time - never mind the implausible environmentalist Giant Conspiracy, stuff like that’s normal in thrillers - was the magic gadget that caused enemies of the enviroterrorist baddies to be struck by lightning, in cheerful defiance of basic electrophysics.

(Enviroterrorists with the ability to suck lightning out of clouds wouldn’t need to be enviroterrorists any more. They could just start building lightning power stations.)

The real scientific problem with State of Fear whistled right over my head, though. The book contains several Author Filibusters about climate change - or, more specifically, the allegedly poor quality of our knowledge about climate change - and all of those sounded plausible enough to me at the time.

Only because I looked into it later do I know that Crichton was talking absolute cock, and had to be either fully aware of this fact, or senile, or wilfully ignorant.

(See also: Poor old Antony Flew.)

Crichton didn’t seem to be very good at dealing with criticism. He famously named a throwaway character in a later book after someone who’d given State of Fear a very bad review. The throwaway character was a baby-rapist. Classy.

Anyway, I like to think that if I’d read State of Fear when I was twelve, I’d also have looked up the facts afterwards. But I bet I wouldn’t have.

The world is, self-evidently, well-stocked with people who don’t do any more due diligence on what they read than I would have when I was a kid. People believe bestselling thrillers that make statements about the nature of the world, especially when those statements are the core of the whole story, as they are in all of Crichton’s works. If you’re writing about things that happen on Planet Zarnax or in the Cthulhu mythos or whatever then that’s one thing, but if a book’s whole anvil-subtle thesis is that the scientific consensus about climate change is wrong, you need to take your share of the responsibility for everyday voters believing that you’re right.

Heck, even utter garbage like Left Behind has an enthusiastic audience of people who don’t even bother checking its statements against the Bible. Much less check to see whether, to name just one of a very long list of outrageous wall-bangers, the United Nations really does have the power to take over the whole world on a whim.

Given the power of popular books, it’s simply irresponsible to put misinformation about matters vitally important to the whole world in books which you - and your bank account - know are read by orders of magnitude more voters than read the scientific papers that prove you wrong.

If you’re the only loud voice that’s talking rubbish, then it’s not such a big deal. But when there’s a genuine culture war going on about climate change, or evolution, or dear-god-now-they’re-coming-after-neuroscience, the side you pick matters. State of Fear seems to have become a sort of easy-reading textbook for climate-change deniers. Look, for instance, at whole-hearted support Crichton got from fellow bullshit artist James Inhofe.

People should be allowed to write, publish and read whatever the heck they like, no matter how contrary to fact it is.

But if you’re in the business of lying to people about matters of grave global importance, I for one am not going to shed a tear when you die.

(On the subject of books that contain wise and wordy characters who entirely agree with the author, see also Robert Heinlein, whose books I loved as a kid. In my memory, Time Enough For Love is completely awesome. So I’m not going to make the mistake of trying to read it again now. Fortunately, kids’ sci-fi that actually gets the science more or less right also exists.)

Why do you need a new CPU?

Well, isn’t it obvious?

(See also here and here.)

When I first saw this crane in the LUGnet news I, of course, immediately thought “what’s Meccano doing on a Lego site?”

But this is, in fact, a Lego construction, built out of the studless beams that’re now normal for all Lego Technic. It’s got a long way to go before it can challenge the biggest cranes built with old-style studded beams, but it’s an imposing creation nonetheless. (Note the Linear-Actuator-driven counterweight mechanism!)

It is, of course, entirely traditional for a bigger toy to humiliate a smaller one.

I’ve been doing that for years.

Do you want to tackle your alcohol addiction with safe and effective herbal medicine?

Look no further than Great Home Remedies’ How To Prevent Alcohol And Drug Addiction page!

I particularly liked the part that says:

“Very effective remedy: Take 1 lovage root and 2 laurel leaves, add 250 ml of vodka and leave it in a dark place for 14 days. Let an alcoholic drink a whole glass. Usually even 1 time is enough to stop an alcohol addiction, but you may do it 2-3 times.”

I suppose it must be the laurel that does the trick there, since lovage is one of the flavouring ingredients in Bénédictine liqueur. Which has not demonstrated a strong tendency to cure people who drink it of wanting to drink. Although if you polish off a whole bottle, you may not very much desire to drink Bénédictine any more.

(I call this situation a “I haven’t drunk X since Y” story. Popular Xs include black Sambuca, ouzo, and any pre-mixed cocktail based on Baileys Irish Cream, especially if it’s a generic copy thereof. The Y part of everybody’s story is usually very similar.)

250 millilitres of 80-proof vodka will, of course, also give you about the same amount of alcohol as a six-pack of beer. In one belt. But any proper alcoholic should be able to handle that, with a water chaser.

(If you leave the vodka in an open container for the 14 days then a significant amount of the alcohol may have evaporated off, of course. But they don’t tell you to do that.)

More seriously, one problem with this and various other herbal remedies is that the amount of active ingredients in a given plant can vary widely even within the one species. Different plants can have different concentrations depending on their strain and how and where they grew, and fresh bits of the plant can be very different from dried bits, too.

And, even more importantly, instructions that tell you to use “2 laurel leaves” do not specify which of the thousands of members of Lauraceae family they’re talking about. Some members of Lauraceae are not known as laurels - cinnamon and avocado, for instance - which makes it a little easier. But there are several other “laurels” that aren’t members of Lauraceae at all.

When you’re playing a computer game, you know that when you pick a “nightshade mushroom”, or whatever, you’ve definitely got the right thing, because there are only a dozen species of pickable plant in the whole game, so anything that looks like ginseng or mandrake root must be. In the real world, though, almost no plants have a common name that’s not applied to many other quite different plants.

In this case, the “laurel leaves” they’re talking about are probably “bay leaves” from the Bay Laurel. But then there’s the entirely unrelated California Bay Laurel, whose leaves are poisonous. But maybe where you live, “laurel” means Camphor Laurel (mildly poisonous, but utterly different from Bay Laurel), or Cherry Laurel (berries edible, everything else poisonous).

You’ll face the same problem with most other medicinal, and even simple food, plants. Something that looks like fennel, or like a parsnip, or (of course) like an edible mushroom, can kill you. And it even applies to the other ingredient in the anti-alcoholism six-pack cocktail; buy “lovage root” and you’ll very probably get the usual kind of lovage, Levisticum officinale, but then there’s the related “Alexanders“, a.k.a. “Black Lovage”, and Laserpitium latifolium, “Bastard Lovage”, and even a poisonous lookalike sometimes called “Water Lovage”. And that’s not even all of the lovages!

Take-home message: Use herbal medicines if you like. Make herbal medicines if you like. But make sure you pin down the full Latin name of your ingredients before you eat them, and don’t trust any source that doesn’t give you the exact names.

Given the desperation of the various cop shows to find new stories “plucked from the headlines” (translation: “we’d rather not have to write our own plots”), I’m surprised that none of them seem to have featured Awful Vengeance wreaked upon a series of spammers.

I remember one Law & Order SVU episode (well, that’s probably what it was, they all kind of blend together) featured a child molester tempted into offending again by “Lolita” porno spam. This episode was of course every bit as plot-holed-below-the-waterline as every other computer-related plot on mainstream TV, but I’d forgive the usual “I tracked his traceroute to a ping from 374.257.-111.999, which means he’s using 5-bit ASCII…” stuff as long as enough spammers were finding other spammers’ ears in their mailboxes.

I’ve got the plot outline for them right here.

Former Special Forces guy loses a leg somewhere he’s not at liberty to talk about, uses his disability payments to start a little Internet Service Provider in his home town, and gets into one of those horrible legal battles with a spamming customer who forces him to keep hosting their server. Then goes on murderous crusade.

He can’t just kill the guy he’s having problems with, of course. He’ll be the first suspect. If he kills eight other spammers first, though, then keeps on killing more spammers afterwards, he’ll be harder to catch.

(Preferable murder technique: Cutting something valuable off the spammer and commenting on how it doesn’t seem nearly as big as the advertisements promised, while they bleed out.)

The actual spammer-homicide rate is miserably low. There was that one Russian guy in ‘05, and a couple back in 1999, and that’s about it as far as I know. (Anybody know of any others?)

So if nobody can make this happen in the real world, it should at least happen on TV.