Mad Mike Hughes actually did it!

Mad Mike Hughes, the guy who build a steam-powered rocket to prove that the Earth is flat, succeeded in launching himself into the sky yesterday. He reached an altitude of about 600 meters, was battered in the landing, but he survived.

The one thing he did not accomplish was to prove that the Earth is flat.

I don’t quite get the point of the rocket, though. He could have just rented a Cessna, which has a service ceiling of something around 5000 meters, and reached a significantly higher altitude with little personal risk, and he probably wouldn’t have needed to be carried away in a stretcher afterwards.

Do you want to fight about movies some more?

I saw A Wrinkle in Time last night. My wife enjoyed it.

I hated it. Hated the whole thing. If I’d been alone, I’d have just walked out on it.

Things just happened in the plot, which made no logical sense. There was no feeling of consistency or reason to this universe, the writers had a whim and made it happen on the screen. There was all this New Age crap throughout — yeah, there was “quantum”, and there was “vibration”, and wouldn’t you know it, the secret ingredient that made it possible for Chris Pine to teleport (oh, excuse me, “tesser”) 91 billion light years to a conveniently habitable planet was the “vibration of love”.

Worst movie I’ve seen this year. Go ahead, fight me.

I can’t believe they’re making a movie of Ready Player One

It’s coming out on 26 March, and the book was appalling dreck. The only question is whether the movie will improve on the source material somehow, and be at best a direct-to-dvd crapfest, or whether it will wallow in the bizarre 80s obsession and be a Star Wars Christmas special for millennials. I’m going guess the latter.

Yes, I know, some of you will tell me that you loved the book. Don’t care. It was a one-shot special purpose stimulator for geek/nerd pleasure centers, and I’m sure it was like a hit of cocaine for some of you. It was, however, an objectively bad book.

Here’s another example of its flaws that initially sailed right past me, because I didn’t care for much of any of 1980s cartoons built around toys, or Knight Rider, or the A Team, and even the stuff I did enjoy at the time, like E.T. and The Goonies, weren’t well captured by the book, except as fleeting references that I was supposed to adore. “Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is a circle jerk of male geek culture sustained over a grueling 400 pages.” Yeah, it’s a stroll through the Not-Pink Aisle at Toys’R’Us.

That why everything from Transformers to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can get reimagined with CGI reverence — but the idea of a blockbuster live-action American Girl Dolls or The Powerpuff Girls franchise sounds laughable.

Hey! I really liked the Powerpuff Girls! They were much better than He-Man, which my kids just ate up.

Here’s an amusing riff on the built-in bias: Jenny Nicholson reads from an imaginary Ready Player One…For Girls. It’s just like the version for boys! Bad!

Friday Cephalopod: Female cuttlefish are conspiring together!

Oh, sure, you all hear about the bold dominance displays of male cuttlefish, and their camouflage, and the flashing color changes, but this is a new one on me. The females have a unique display, that they only show to other females (or to themselves in a mirror).

Here it is an a drawing: elegant, understated, quite nice.

What I find disturbing is that they do not display this signal to any other males — it’s like a secret code for the lady cuttlefishes only. What are they communicating? Are they talking about me? Do they have secrets no male is permitted to discover?

I bet it’s for the cuttlefish whisper network.

M. E. Palmer, M. Richard Calvé, Shelley A. Adamo (2006) Response of female cuttlefish Sepia officinalis (Cephalopoda) to mirrors and conspecifics: evidence for signaling in female cuttlefish. Animal Cognition 9(2):151-155.

Listen while you still can

The last episode of the Just Us Women podcast is up, for now, and it’s heartbreaking. She’s leaving the atheist movement for reasons that are all too common.

I will no longer be interviewing women who have left religion, since I cannot in good conscience refer them to the atheist community, where they could find support. … All the resources are tainted with connections to the top tier of misogynist, sexist men.

This is where we are now. I don’t see how atheism, as any kind of movement, will recover.

The gun-fondlers have now found a more appropriate venue for their videos

YouTube is cracking down, and banning all those macho gun-flogging videos that have apparently been so popular with the more violent segment of society. So the poor gun exhibitionists have had to find a venue that will tolerate them.

They have. It’s called PornHub.

I can’t imagine a more appropriate choice. Not to disparage the harmless people who just like to show off their primary and secondary sexual characteristics in action, but gun-nuts do at least have something in common with obsessive and unrealistic displays of penises in ecstasy.

Watch out for pretexts for war!

John Bolton is our new national security advisor. Trump has once again picked the worst man for the job.

He has now selected John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations. Bolton has distinguished himself as one of America’s most hawkish and ineffective diplomats for decades. He is known as an architect of the Iraq War, an enemy of multilateralism and foe of the United Nations, where he served during the George W. Bush administration through a recess appointment when he could not win Senate confirmation. He is also a harsh critic of the Iran nuclear deal and of North Korea, and is seen as someone who might promote conflict in both cases.

Few prominent national security figures are as ill-suited to the job of national security adviser as Bolton when you consider his views, his temperament and his ability be an honest broker. In fact, he is actually one of the few people on earth who would be worse than Mike Flynn, who was the worst national security adviser of all time.

Really, Bolton is terrible. For anything.

Keep your eyes open. There’s going to be a desperate search for excuses to go to war with someone, anyone, to prop up the president’s plummeting popularity. There are going to be more inventions, like “WMDs in country X”, or “Aluminum tubes!” and there are going to be assholes promoting pre-emptive nuclear strikes, and there will be torture advocates in the CIA slavering at the thought of getting to clean up afterwards.

I wouldn’t put anything past them. The only provocation to war that I’ll believe wasn’t engineered by John Bolton and his vicious crew would be the assassination of our national security advisor. I don’t think he’s mad enough to go that far. But I could be wrong.

Jordan Peterson is a bit touchy

Jordan Peterson is quick to deflect accusations of bigotry by standing tall, throwing his shoulders back, and declaring that he was made a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe, and he’s also quick to complain if anyone questions it.

Unfortunately for him, though, all those protestations motivated Robert Jago to actually investigate them.

What first drew my attention to Peterson’s ties to the Kwakwaka’wakw, however, was the way he seemed to be exploiting that “friendship.” He appeared to be deploying it as a talisman to ward off any social consequences for helping spread racial stereotypes about Indigenous people. It was a defence rooted in identity politics—his language was okay, because he is, after all, an “Indian” through his connection to Charles Joseph. Yet Peterson himself, in a Youtube video, called that “whole group-identity thing” a “pathology” and “reprehensible.”

So he did the obvious thing: he asked the Kwakwaka’wakw people if Peterson was a member of the tribe. Whoops, he’s not. Everyone agrees he’s not. He’s been formally recognized as a good friend of one family, which is nice, but that’s it.

Peterson’s Twitter outburst against what he called Mishra’s “lies and halftruths” has ignited a heated debate within the Kwakwaka’wakw people. The debate isn’t about whether or not Peterson is truly a member of the tribe. I spoke to community members, and each confirmed that the naming ceremony that Peterson took part in does not grant him membership. Instead, there is concern about the harm caused by the way he has boasted of and exaggerated his Kwakwaka’wakw connections. Juli Holloway, a Kwakwaka’wakw community member whose family is in the process of arranging for a similar adoption ceremony for a non-Native friend, describes how she sees the problem: “It’s the lack of humility that bothers me the most, I guess. It should not be a badge of honour. It’s for within the community, not for without.”

#NotYourShield, Dr Peterson.

Peterson has posted a “rebuttal“, only it’s not, not at all. He posts a lot of photos of his naming ceremony, which no one disputes happened, and tells of his long friendship with a Kwakwaka’wakw artist, which no one has denied, but it doesn’t address at all the accusation that he has misrepresented the purpose of the ceremony. He does declare that Jago is “chock full of underhanded allegations” and was “a muckraker with an agenda and not to be trusted”. I guess that settles that.