CONTROL GROUP C

Why Biology Will Make You Better at Video Games

2010-11-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

One of my friends asked a while ago why I don't write about more science here, after all, the name will suggest that this is a science blog. And she's right. This entry will be primarily for nerds- sorry, Anna.

Pokemon is the obvious place to start- yes, yes, we get it: Heracross looks like a stag beatle, Butterfree is a butterfly, the bird-type pokemon are birds. But the game designers have a few more insidious examples then these, which are worth pointing out.

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On the left, the large flower cheerfully molesting these nice tourists is Rafflesia arnoldii. On the right is Vileplume. Unlike all those damn Oddish, Rafflesia is difficult to find and even more so when in bloom, which it only is for a few days every year. It has no leaves and no chlorophyll, parasiting the vine of a certain tree. Rafflesia is famous for smelling like a dead body when in bloom, which will cause flies to come and pollinate the giant, ugly flower.

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Chinchou's bioluminescence is, of course, inspired by the wide variety of deep-sea creatures that light up. But its shape bears some resemblance to two far more common marine creatures, the copepod and some kinds of dinoflagellates.Also, this ctenophore (more on them later) bears a certain resemblance:

...But it wasn't actually discovered until 2005, 6 years after the second generation of Pokemon came out. Life imitates Pokemon, anybody?

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Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker fans will recognize Gohma, the giant worm living in Dragon Roost Cavern. Well, Gohma, meet Eunices aphroditois, also known as the Bobbit worm, one of the largest polychaete (segmented ocean-living) worms ever at recorded lengths of 9.8 feet. Eunices will burrow itself into sand, and launch itself out at anything brushes by its tentacles. Wikipedia puts it best: "Armed with sharp teeth, it is known to attack with such speeds that its prey is sometimes sliced in half."
Eeeek. I guess Gohma isn't that scary after all.

(Note: when I initially thought of the connection, it was between Eunices and Volvagia, the 'subterranean lava dragon' of the Fire Temple, who more accurately represents the species as he will leave his hole occasionally to chase the player. Gohma, however, clearly bears the resemblance, and then I realized that LoZ has a love affair with giant burrowing worms: Volvagia, Twinmold from Majora's Mask, Gohma, and Morpheel from Twilight Princess, among others.)

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Not an animal comparison, but you'll remember the Zoras from Ocarina of Time. My brother speculated that the reason they didn't appear in Ocarina's successor, Windwaker, wasn't because they were killed, but because they're freshwater beings and couldn't adapt to a salty ocean. At first I agreed, but then realized that the Zoras in Majora's Mask lived in the Great Bay, which was clearly marine.

(Then again, Majora took place in an alternate universe. Make your own call.)

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Lastly, Halo. I went looking for some pictures of aliens and found this.

How the hell does it move? Does it push itself?

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Note: I thank the insidious bogleech for inspiring this post- I think I only directly stole an example from him once, but he still deserves many props. If this sort of thing interests you, you should read his articles.

The Unicorn

2010-10-22T23:17:00.000-07:00

The last unicorn died on March 5th, 2001, found between the teeth of a yarder in a primal forest in Bulgaria, which had been flying cut timber into a truck bound for sawmill.

Four notable university professors were called in to examine the carcass, tangled as it was from becoming caught in the machinery, and the consensus was clear: it was most definitely and decidedly a unicorn. Why, look, they said, pointing to its silver pelt, its diamond hooves, and its spiralled horn, what else could it be? And what's more, they said, it was most assuredly the last unicorn. That much was undeniable. It was the only unicorn that anyone had ever seen, and it would be the last.

The public outcry was enormous. Bulgaria was the ancestral home of the unicorn, and where would one find a unicorn but in the last lush and primeval forests to grow there? They were sacred animals, written into the book of God, abandoned by Noah, forced to flee to the ocean, yet now, so clearly illustrated, they had returned to land! Drawn only to light and goodness, the unicorn could purify sickness and come back from the dead; it was magical and wise, not to say anything of all the power of a cup made from its horn.

The fact remained, however: there had only ever been one unicorn, and now it was dead.

Over the world, the excitement regarding the unicorn slowly died down, and life returned to normal. A small sculpture of the lone unicorn was placed by a road near the forest, and drew a few tourists.

In time, however, some people began to wonder. If that one animal, that one divine animal of hallowed glades and whispered forest pathways, had managed to spear itself on a wire running through the trees, could there be more? Suppose that in fading Amazon cloud forests, in Congo jungle, in the melting Arctic, there were more? How many more? What was it they had always heard about the unexamined life? They pulled on their coats, murmured I'll-be-back-soons to friends and lovers, stepped out their front doors. They had to check.

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This is a short and mostly blatant and badly-written short story about unicorns. I wrote it pretty late a couple of nights ago. This is probably about all you need to know.

From a Paper Presented...

2010-10-22T23:03:00.000-07:00

From paper presented at the Annual Galactic Social & Anthropological Conference, Sept. 12, 4105-CE

The planet is an oddity among most spacefaring races, a small curiosity circling a star nestled between the horns of Capricorn. It was encountered first by a scouting fleet from the Baron d Baron system, who studied it from the atmosphere: noting that it was little more then a tribal planet, nowhere near approaching the age of space exploration, but that something interesting seemed to be occurring all the same.

The planet is larger then most, and more tempermental. Two oceans bleed through a single huge continent, and there are precious few forests to divide the nourishing desert that covers it. This desert is the home of the people, and they take to it with hoes and spears, with plow and with feedbag. The goat-like animals they raise follow them amidst the rocks and bones, picking at sweet grass planted in the footsteps of the tribe that came before. The People rarely starve or become lost, because day and night, they follow the Pattern.

It is thought that the Pattern emerged from cairns and trail ducks: a way to indicate to strangers where fresh water or cropland lay. Now, though, it is marked by complex patterns of rocks: points of goat skulls and long trails through the sand, which eventually lead to another node of rocks and another choice of trails. Always, it is the Pattern that tells them which one to take.

The rock patterns themselves appear extraordinarily complex, but are in reality, after some practice, little more then symbolic representations of what lays ahead, with instructions on which route to go under which conditions (rainfall, degree of hunger, smokesigns from another tribe). When faced with these simple directions, it is hard even for the People to imagine the pattern as a network- but that's really what it is, what makes it so rare: it's a pandemic machine, iteration upon iteration of social trails, a cosmic yes-no. The Pattern is appended whenever necessary- when a new watering hole is found, a few stones here and there write another step into the ground, and the pattern is made that much more complex.

The People have no written language of note, yet they appear to understand the pattern instinctively. While the duty of reading the rocks often falls to a single well-trained man or woman, even children grasp it intuitively.

When dealing with The People, it's hard to avoid the word “computer.” Well, why should we? It is not “wrong” to call it what it is, it does not “reduce the sentient and intelligent citizens of the planet to the level of mere cogs in a machine,” as some of my more vocal critics have put it. The Pattern is a series of inputs and outputs designed to process and manipulate data. Isn't it best to call it what it is, acknowledging that the People have designed a working data processor in their stone age?

To go on, we must first define the characteristics of true computers.
-They are complex machines.
-They input and refine data.
-They are programmable.

That the Pattern is complex goes without saying. It refines data as well: various elements depend on the weather or time of year, and use this to select the path that will be of most benefit to the tribes. And the Pattern, arguably, can be programmed. A section of land, approximately one thousand by three hundred miles bordering the southern ocean has been tentatively identified as a solar calculator, and has operated in its current configuration for approximately 30 years. It seems to be calculating the distance between the planet and its moon, based on easily observable measurements.

This is of particular interest to us. There is no conceivable scenario in which this would be useful for the People. Additionally, the calculations, although simple, seem to be nothing that the People (with their apparent non-interest in mathematics) could or would work out individually. The fact of the matter becomes apparent: the Pattern is performing specific, complex tasks that the People have no interest in. If the People aren't running the show there, who is? Some very interesting new theories suggest that the vast majority of the Pattern which (which, as far as we could determine prior, served no real purpose) is, in fact, of sufficient complexity to have become be pseudointelligent. I propose, then, that, yes, the pattern can be programmed- it already has been.

Moving on. It has been discussed that there must be ways of editting the pattern. Hypothetically, it could be done. The nodes themselves are not terribly complex, and a simulator could be developed which would display what we could create by moving the nodes. Here, however, the biological component of the mechanism works against us: if the People realize that huge somethings from space are rearranging their lives' work, they will lose faith in it and abandon the Pattern. The People have no idea of our existence, and by interfering, we will do just that- ruin it.

I will have to veer into philosophy for a moment. There are miles and miles, in fact, most of the Pattern, without any obvious purpose. As sentient, social beings, we can hardly not think of what could be gained from talking with a planet-sized mind. The fact, however, remains: we cannot interact with it. At the very least, of sufficient attention is drawn to this solitary planet, then perhaps in the future it will be feasible to map the entire surface of the planet via satellite, and simulate the movement of the people on its surface, effectively creating a Pattern that can be edited on our own terms. (My bias as a sociologist is that this will be a very poor substitute for the real thing. But technology continues to improve every day, and I may yet be proven wrong.)

A detailed initial survey of the planet showed a number of constructed buildings, or at least remains of buildings, that are most definitely not completable with the People's current levels of technology. In the first few years that the planet was known to science, it was suspected that the People's pattern-building instincts stemmed in some way from the prior culture: a culture so great, with such fervor, that when it went out, it not only left its ruins on the planet, but left its technological instincts imprinted on the People's minds so strongly that even today, they still follow rock lines in the dust.

We now know that is not true.

In fact, materials recovered from these ruins and analyzed has revealed pages upon pages of information on the lives of the Planet's prior empire. These details are fantastic, beautiful, and mostly trivial. Of the People as we know them, only a few paragraphs are devoted- but what we can recover from then is that the People far surpass in age this once-prosperous empire, going back at least to its roots and further.

To offer some scale, the empire fell at least ten thousand years ago.

Even the denizens of the prior empire were prone to speculating on the motivations of their nomadic brethren. “Far be it from me to know what causes the goat-farmers and grass-growers to move endlessly in their slow spirals, who will not stop for chat nor food nor threat of arms…” read the memoirs of an anonymous scholar. “But having watched them for many years, move past the far edges of Sacred Land, I can safely say that they are possessed of a knowledge granted to them by right of some unknown angel, a knowledge we cannot understand and have no reason to want to.”

Having spent the majority of the last ten years of his life studying the People and their Pattern, the author puts forth another theory: that instead of extradimensional knowledge or half-remembered urges, the existence of the Pattern is an evolutionary fluke: an unrepeatable, useless, and extraordinary fluke in the fabric of life. “Deus ex machina”, if you will.

Given the nature of the anomaly, I believe that is the best name we can give to it.

THE ICE CREAM CUPCAKE

2010-05-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

It just so happened that this month, one of my favorite blogs, the Cupcake Project, is hosting a contest (along with Scoopalicious): the Ice Cream Cupcake Contest. Well, I've never made an ice cream cupcake before, but was I willing to try?

Yes, yes I was.

The first step was to come up with a plan of attack. I was considering a modification of my usual Orange Utopia Cookies (recipe coming soon!), possibly a marbled cupcake with orange sherbert and white frosting. The Orange Utopia Cupcake, second evolution of the Orange Utopia Cookie. What I decided, though, was that I needed something even more creative.
And so the Swedish Fish Ice Cream Cupcake was born.

First step is to chop lots of swedish fish candies, sprinkling with flour as you go. The flour serves the double purpose of preventing them from sticking together, and maybe preventing you from eating them all immediately.You know what goes really well with swedish fish? Lemon. Lemon does. So I whipped up a lemon buttercream, and went out to buy some lemon sorbet for the ice cream.
I ended up purchasing this. If you'll allow me to get up on my soapbox for a minute, I love the Haagen-Daaz "Five" brand. The ice cream is tasty and rich, and the idea of knowing all of the ingrediants in a product, of a short ingrediants list, is irresistable. No seaweed, no high-fructose anything, no tumeric, no propylene glycol (actual ice-cream component: I think I'd rather put it in my car). The lemon ice cream was rich, lemony, and very delicious.

To make the cupcakes, of course, I just put some ice cream on each one (do you know how hard it is to get nice round spheres? It's hard, man), then piped the yellow frosting onto them (the ice cream was hardly yellow at all! But that's a good thing, because that means it has no strange dyes in it). I topped them with some swedish fish and a sprinkling of red sugar (mash sugar and food color in a bag until it homogenizes).Delicious.

Having a cute platter around helps too, of course. Below are two different styles. The Little Boy and Fat Man, if you will.

Marvelous.

GREATCOAT: Story of a Legend

2010-05-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

On Christmas Day, much to my delight, there it was- hanging on the door hinge across the room from the christmas tree, shrouded in green paper. I could hardly wait to tear it open, to run my fingers through its thick woolen layers, and to shrug it over my shoulders and feel its delightful weight across my back. I didn't wait long- pulling aside the tape that enveloped it, and stepping back to look.

It was... frumpy. There's not a better way to describe it. The wool was too thick, and wrinkled all over. That afternoon, we attacked it with a steam iron, but even once the biggest and baddest of the wrinkles were gone, there was no way of denying that my dreamy German greatcoat just wouldn't work. Far too thick, only knee-length, impossible to take on and off. We weren't quite sure what to do with it.

Then my own lovely mother did a very lovely thing.
She made me my coat.

It took maybe a month, though she wasn't working then. First came the designing. The best part about having your talented mom make you a coat is that anything goes. The floor-sweeping length? Check. The exquisitely hemmed Belgian back? Check. The blue color of the Torchwood inspiration coat? Check. Fun extras like a brilliant brocaded silk lining? Why the hell not?

After days of childlike excitement, it was finished.
Oh, my, god.
It was worth it.

Detail of the back
The lining is great. It always surprises people when they see it, and if I'm running, it flares out all bright and red.

Unfortunately, at the time of me writing this post, it's already into spring, and this coat, although lighter then the ones I was looking at, is still thick and solid. Soon, it should be too warm to wear it. It's already gotten plenty of use.

And what will I do then? Mope. Then, dryclean it.

And then, hang it away. Wait for the end of summer and the start of fall.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the best mother ever.

AUCTION CAKE

2010-04-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

So, I've clearly been away for a while, and one day I will in fact explain the beautiful and elegant result that came of the greatcoat project.
Right now, though, just look at this.
This cake, made for the Garfield High School auction, was quite possibly the most intensive cake I've ever done. Let me break it down:

Marbled white/chocolate interior (adapted from Aunt Di's Bittersweet Chocolate Birthday cake, out of All Cakes Considered by Melissa Gray)
Ganache filling (I think it was ganache. Everything tastes like ganache when you've been working on a cake for a while.)
White Chocolate Swiss buttercream frosting (amazing and delicious. Every true baker should make a Swiss buttercream at least once in their life. I think my recipe came from Martha Stewart's Wedding Cakes.)
Meringue mushrooms (from the meringue recipe in Sunset Magazine's Cookies, and inspired by Martha Stewart's book again)
And a white chocolate butterfly.

It took a week to finish, it took cancelled plans to frost, it took frantic purchasing of ingredients, it took panic. Was it, in the end, worth it?
Well, it did raise 400 dollars. So... yes, I would say so. :)

GREATCOAT: An Update!

2009-12-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

I asked for the Belgian one. May or may not be on its way. Wish me luck!

RAINIER CAKE

2009-12-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

This is the SCA.And this is the SCA.

Okay, I lied. This is the SCA.
All the other photos are my pictures from my experiences with the SCA CLC Seattle Program. But this isn't important. What is important is that the SCA is amazingly fun to be in, rewarding, and plain awesome. It's an environmental service group, and one of the keystones of the program is its Summer Crews, the normal one of which is a two-week expedition to the nearby Mount Rainier. With this in mind, and the annual holiday party coming up, I figured I had to do something. I had to make a cake. An awesome cake.

To make a volcanic mountain cake, what better then a red velvet cake? Forget your usual reservations about putting two ounces of food coloring in a cake (if you're using paste or gel colors, it's less) and have fun with it. Everyone loves a red velvet cake.
To fill up two nine-inch square pans, I doubled this recipe. Don't worry about the 2 ounces of food coloring part if you don't have it all. Just dump in a whole bunch.
After baking, I filled the cakes with cream cheese icing, shaped it into a mountain shape, and then use a thinned version to do what the show Cake Boss calls "dirty icing"....For obvious reasons.mmmmmmmmmmm
Later, it's time to get some actual frosting down. White and chocolate flavored buttercream served the purpose well. The thing was, I wanted an accurate picture of Mt. Rainier. This required extensive Wikipedia-scoping, procurement of multiple maps, and, well...

This is how everyone cooks, right?
Closer-up shot of the cake.

Green-colored coconut shavings and icing, and Swedish pearl sugar add character...

Delicious. But it eeds some entirely gratuitous details.

Perfect. Map of Narada Falls, Paradise Visitor's Center (in pink) and Panorama Point. And the flag. It was accompanied with some cookies.Homemade royal icing. Beautiful. And tasty.

And though it was quite dry and needed more filling, I think everyone liked the cake too. :)
I'll finish up the post with a sonnet I wrote, "Song for the Mountain".

O, exalted mount of mine, I know you

Having run my hands along your face.

Each snow-anointed facet on the blue

And every climber climbing into space.

O frosty meadows high upon your sides

Pale grasses green that grow where no tree can

Yet higher, even they are brushed aside

To snow and other things unknown to man.

O holy mount, I've seen you waiting there,

Our human city streets point up to you.

Great queen of magma, ice, and high clear air:

A blessed land's bright gemstone, through and through.

O misty mount, I catch you in my gaze,

And I remember you and all those holy days.

ASTRONOMICAL

2009-12-11T19:48:00.000-08:00

"Astronomical" is a short science fiction story I wrote this last August. More information on the Voyager Golden Record is here.

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Our planet was dying. There are many explanations I could give for this, countless stories of failures and failed ideas and the inability of one lonely species to see the truth, endless tales of ignorance and of the worst possible living sin, stupidity. But none of these reasons are excuses, and in any case I am not looking for sympathy. So suffice to say that our planet was dying, while we yearned to live.

I was in the Council of Sciences. Several years earlier, we had sat down the most formidable minds of our time, and broken down our situation, assessing the level of our threat- dire, indeed, very dire- and more importantly, discussing what we would need for a solution. It was called the Thirty Year Plan. The common people thought this referred to what we were going to do over the next thirty years to solve their problems. In actuality, it was the maximum calculated length of time we had until civilization broke down, and possibly methods of lengthening that time.

We would need land, and food, and fuel, and we didn't have the resources to attain any of it. We did, yes, have a prototype starship available to us, and enough energy to power it many light years, but the starship could not carry a city, and there was already talk of breaking it down and using the power source to produce heat or food or any of the supplies already in dire need. Our planet was dying. Our people were starving. We needed hope.

Then it came, out of the stars, like a gift from the gods we had officially denounced. We spotted it in the atmosphere long before it touched the surface of our planet, and a rocket was sent to retrieve it from orbit. It fell to earth in an unpopulated desert, and was removed by a single unmarked van. We couldn't afford to get anyone's hopes up.

I was fortunate to be chosen to help study the Artifact. The bulk of it was badly dented, stained, and entirely foreign to us. It was made by hands, and the hands were not ours.

There was some manner of electrical devices built into it, although they were all but melted and ashen ropes now. The only item we could recover was a single, beautiful, golden disk, covered in tiny circular ridges on one side and engraved all over on the other. We all stared at the markings. They were unlike anything we had ever seen.

"I don't want to jump to conclusions," said my good friend Professor Maddy, after some discussion, "But these drawings could, after some imagination, be a star map of sorts." He indicated a set of abstract dots and lines. "And these," gesturing to an outlined shape, "Could almost be life of some sort." He was saying what all of us were thinking, what we didn't want to think. I put my hand on his back. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," I said gently.

"Yes," said the Head of the Council. "Absolutely. Research on this item must start immediately, but not a word of this is to be given to the public. Does everyone here understand? Not a word." He looked around, expression softening. "False hope is another commodity we cannot afford." Everyone understood what he meant.

The next day, I was assigned to speak at a protest in the city of Voss. This was the part of my job I hated most. Voss was impoverished, hungry, massive, and angry, perhaps rightfully so. I would have to smile, and try to address and support their concerns by feeding them lies, hopefully by mentioning the Thirty Year Plan as much as I could. That always seemed to reassure them.

I stood, later, in a crumbling and formerly-grand auditorium in Voss. The entire room was packed with filthy, hungry, extinguished souls, all of them staring at me, dead silent.

"I would like to c-commend you for your concern," I stammered. "But your g-government, and the Council of Sciences, have only your best interests in… In mind, and we are working on finding solutions to the most pressing issues we face, namely the food and water shortages, the economic sh-shortfalls, as well as pollution. We want to assure you that we are doing everything we can to deal with these. I will now f-field questions." I tugged at the collar of my shirt, as the room dissolved into angry muttering. A young reporter with a microphone stood up.

"Professor Rook," she addressed me, "You say you are addressing the poverty and the food and water shortages in communities around the planet. What exactly are you doing?"

I adjusted my hat normally. "We are developing new and improved filtration methods and agricultural practices," I said, "Which should drastically increase the amount of food raised. The… Uh, the production and implementation of these techniques will require a sub… substantial new workforce, thus increasing hiring. This, and more, is all covered in the Thirty Year Plan."

Another reporter stood up. "You know, all the officials I've heard have talked about the Thirty Year Plan, but I haven't heard any specifics yet. What is the Thirty Year Plan going to do about overpopulation? About our waning food populations? About the poverty? Professor, what is the Thirty Year Plan?"

"The Thirty Year Plan cannot be fully disclosed, because we believe that total disclosure will alter the intended results," I read off of my prompter. "Suffice to say that the Thirty Year Plan is being enacted as we speak, and is showing results." Deemphasize, deflect, reassure. Easy enough.
The crowd had begun shouting about the lack of results. I felt small.

Somewhere in the back, a well-dressed man stood up. He didn't have a microphone, and his loud voice carried his words.

"Professor Rook," he said smoothly. "I recently discovered an unrevealed government report- it my have been somewhat confidential, I apologize- but it stated that some sort of object- known as the Artifact, I believe- fell out of the sky several days ago, and, let me quote the report- 'It is certainly man-made, although it is engraved with multiple symbols not recognized, and is nearly positively non-terrestrial in design.' What can you tell us about the Artifact, professor?"

The room was silent. I felt as though I had been punched in the chest. I had written those words. The Artifact. They knew about the Artifact. I watched the man fade into the crowd again.

"Y-yes, the, uh, the anomaly- the Artifact, as it's known- does present some curiosity to us, but it's… Certainly not a definite symbol of anything. Research is… R-research is ongoing." The prompter was black. Silence.

"Why didn't you tell us?" A voice screamed. A civilian somewhere.

"We, uh, we didn't want to g-get anyone's hopes up…" The mass broke into screams and boiled like a pot of water. I felt sick. I felt like a monster. Security rushed in. The meeting ended shortly after that.

They had to change our hotel reservations. They put security in the lobby. Nobody found us. I called Maddy, asking about the Artifact.
They had found nothing. They had bounced light off of it, scanned it, studied it, measured the ridges, put them through our best codebreaking programs. Nothing at all. And news of it had encircled the planet by now.

I slept with my two mates that night, Jai and Adel. None of their comforting, their nuzzling, their reassurances helped. Eventually their soft words and contact degraded into the slow, heavy, silence. When I tried to sleep, I tossed and turned helplessly. I latched onto the thought that the Artifact, instead of being a greeting or a chance occurrence, was in fact a plea for help from another dying world, a planet similarly falling apart. Another world running out. It would be unbearable.

In the morning, I woke up early. I snuck into the security guard's break room between shifts, took a gun, and slipped back into my hotel room unnoticed. Jai and Adel slept peacefully, still holding my nonexistent form.

I had to turn away. I was a coward. I held the gun to my head. Straight through the upper eye, that would do it. The people were angry, furious, and they had every right to be. Their water sources had failed them. Their food sources had failed them. Their ecosystem had failed them. We had failed them. They wanted to see the Thirty Year Plan? This was the Thirty Year Plan. I closed my eyes. The phone rang.

I jumped, and turned to see if Jai or Adel had noticed. They hadn't. I shoved the gun into a drawer, and stepped into the hall. "Yes?" I asked tiredly.
"Rook, this is Maddy. The artifact."
"…What about it?"
"We made it work. Look, you know the side with the ridges? We had to balance a pin over it, attach a speaker, and spin it at a very precise rate."
"Almost like a code."
"Maybe. But you have to get over here right now. It's making noise. It's singing."

I was there in under an hour.

By that time, they had reached the apparent end of the recording, and had to reposition the device to make it play again. We sat surrounding the little makeshift player, as the disc spun, absolutely silent.

I heard sounds, the likes of which I had never heard before. Short, organic, staccato beeps and clicks. A low buzzing that rose and fell. Vibrant, voice-like vocalizations from the throats of strange animals, showing anger and joy. Hundreds of sharp, short, airy, melodious whistles, that fell into wondrous natural tunes and songs. A long, low, howl that seemed to swell out of silence, like a mountain out of water, like the sun out of night. Then there was the music.

All different styles, all different sounds. Some like water falling over rocks, some like heartbeats, like screaming, like falling, like love. Unintelligible singing voices wove in and out of them. It was rhythmic and beautiful.

"It's not all," Maddy explained excitedly. "We translated the star maps. We found our star. If we're right, this came from a planet in a solar system 7.7 light years away." Well within reach of the starcraft. I could feel the Thirty Year Plan, and all of my doubts, wither away.

The music ended soon, replaced by tuneful, punctuated voices, all diverse in their influences, all saying things we couldn't interpret, but understood precisely. The music had ended, but I was listening to the most glorious song I would ever hear.

Hello.
Hola.
Bonjour.
Jambo.
Ni hao.

I could barely give the muttered instructions to prep the starcraft. This was the song of salvation, of hope, of deliverance. A song of plenty, of a land of space and air and animals and voices. We thank our otherworldly saviours like tribal ancients, showing gratitude for the lives of the animals they were about to hunt.

So this message is to you, to your planet, to your world that howls and speaks and sings. Thank you for your for your expressions of welcome and invitation, and for your offerings of hope and life.

We hear you.

And we're coming as soon as we can.

POEM FRIDAY: The Little Girl That Lost a Finger

2009-12-04T15:49:00.000-08:00

On fridays with some regularity, Control Group C will try to present a poem I like a lot. Here's today's.

The Little Girl That Lost a Finger
Gabriela Mistral

And a clam caught my little finger,
and the clam fell into the sand,
and the sand was swallowed by the sea,
and the whaler caught it in the sea,
and the whaler arrived at Gibraltar,
and in Gibraltar the fishermen sing:
"News of the earth we drag up from the sea,
news of a little girl's finger:
Let her who lost it come get it!"

Give me a boat to go fetch it,
and for the boat give me a captain,
for the captain give me wages,
and for his wages let him ask for the city:
Merseilles with towers and squares and boats,
in all the world the finest city,
which won't be lovely with a little girl
that the sea robbed of her finger,
and that the whalers chant for like town criers,
and that they're waiting for in Gibraltar...

[Old] HALLOWEEN CAKE

2009-12-03T16:39:00.001-08:00

I like to cook, a lot. And normally when I post a recipe or a desert I've created, I'll show you some making-of pictures, or share some techniques, or be looking for ideas, but this time I don't have any other pictures, and I just want to show off.
This is a Halloween cake for a friend's Halloween party. The base is a couple layers of the "Ultra-Orange Cake" featured in Joy of Cooking, stuck together with a spiced chocolate ganache, frosted with Chocolate Fudge Frosting, and decorated with white chocolate, a powdered sugar/milk glaze when that didn't work, and piped chocolate figures.
...One more picture, because I love you.

A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET

2009-12-03T16:02:00.000-08:00

The Necessity of Color

This is no place for dainty tempered forms
The time is short, the world below my pen.
The artist is an inky lightning storm:
Monsooning thoughts and lead- you know this, then
Creation's a strange process from the heart
As the artist heaves her pencils and her paints
Breathing life into her people and her art
A god of canvas prophets, paper saints.
What's god but he who paints the skies in blue?
And leaves us, till the end of days, controlled
By urgency that guides the artist's tools,
That draws mankind to paint our painted world.
The truth makes godless painters work all night:
They know the world will end in black and white.

[Written for a school assignment. Picture is of Grand Prismatic Springs in Yellowstone, taken from Wikipedia.]

GREATCOAT: Or, a search for the world's best coat

2009-12-02T20:02:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I bought a trenchcoat, and it's been my best friend ever since. If you've seen me, then you've surely seen me in it. Here, take a better look at this beauty:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... Can you see the rippling folds of fabric, the elegant martial collar cut, the floor-brushing length, the olive-drab polyester-cotton exterior, the menagerie of stains up the front, the broken buttons, the rainbow-gone-sour lining that stands in defiance to the forces of logic and fashion...

You know what? You can get your own trenchcoat.

I think it looks better on a human, in any case.

Much better.

But I've been thinking, and I've decided the time has come to get a greatcoat.
It was the British science-fiction show Torchwood that first alerted me to the existence of this illustrious garment. Pictured above is the show's star, Captain Jack Harkness: immortal, sharp-shooting, smooth-talking, omnisexual, future-conman turned head of an extra-secret governmental alien-catching organization. Wow! Also, really hot. Did I just say that? Hi mom, hi dad.

But more then the aliens or the chiseled abs, it was the coat that caught my attention. A sweeping, elegant, graceful, dynamic, charcoal-blue RAF Greatcoat. As to what this meant, I wasn't sure. Let's see.

The Free Dictionary defined a greatcoat as "n (Clothing & Fashion) a heavy overcoat, now worn esp by men in the armed forces".

The Wikipedia entry extrapolated: Greatcoats were heavy and woolen, designed for protection from cold, sometimes included a water-repellant cape over the back, and were used by different military forces in Europe in the First and Second World Wars. The good Captain Jack's own RAF greatcoat would of course have been used by the British Royal Air Force in WWII.

Greatcoats were mostly used in countries containing or occupying frozen wasteland-type areas, such as Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, and Norway, along with of course Britain, and sometimes Canada and the US.

As I search for information, I realize something strange is happening. The fact that all greatcoats are too warm for any kind of casual use, designed for sub-zero temperatures on all scales, heavy, expensive, and hard to find all don't seem to matter any more. I think I'm in love.

---

A given: I must purchase a greatcoat. Which leads me to my next problem. I must find a place to purchase a greatcoat. Craigslist, Ebay, and the local army surplus store were all surprisingly unhelpful. The general internet marketplace was my next step. One store, www.armynavydeals.com, offers no RAF Greatcoats in particular, but does have a fantastic and (comparatively) inexpensive variety of similar period coats. Was my search really at an end? Well, I can't afford any of the listed coats at their prices myself, but Christmas is coming... Now, let's see the choices.

First of all. This Russian greatcoat is drop-dead gorgeous, designed for the siberian wastelands, and costs a king's ransom at $360. When I become rich mining gold in Antarctica, this will be my coat of choice.
The Swiss greatcoat! While not as snazzy as the Russian greatcoat by a long shot, it's about 6 times less expensive. It's plain, but... It is cheap, and, well, a greatcoat...
This is the East German greatcoat. I admit it. I like this one a lot. It looks more trim, martial, and formal then the other possibilities, and the website says it's also lighter.

Lastly, here is the Belgian greatcoat. This one is slightly more expensive then the German coat, though I also like the shape and the buttons... ...along with the back, which I had to include a picture of. None of the other coats were quite this impressive from behind. It's certainly a factor to consider.

All of the aforementioned coats, I should restate, are all actual unissued coats from the wars they were designed for. Real history from real military conflict. But right now, there's more important conflict! I need a coat! Which one do you like best? Please tell me, or drop me any other opinions, and I'll keep you updated as my journey for the World's Best Coat continues.