Fighting the good fight against Morgoth, in Portland

The always excellent Lowering the Bar has a piece about a lady who found herself confronted by a fellow in chainmail, attacking her BMW: Fingolfin Defeated Again

Using wipe-off forms at a doctor's office

I took my daughter to Groovy Molar yesterday to get a tooth checked out, and it was our first visit there, and they used laminated write-on/wipe-off  pages for all the intake paperwork.

After I handed the forms back to them, they entered the data in their computer system, and no trees were harmed in the process. Nice.

I think it's a great idea so I'm passing it along, even though my own left-handed/hook-handed writing style means that it's a challenge for me to use that sort of thing without smudging all the writing.

Could Heinlein win a Hugo today?

Oh, man, John Scalzi's Metafilter response to the sort of 'Heinlen couldn't get a Hugo today, you dang liberals' complaint is priceless:

http://www.metafilter.com/138967/Reclaiming-Heinlein#5537300

...and the reason it is priceless is because it acknowledges that people revere a straw man Heinlein, in rather odd ways:

When people say "Heinlein couldn't win a Hugo today," what they're really saying is "The fetish object that I have constructed using the bits of Heinlein that I agree with could not win a Hugo today." Robert Heinlein -- or a limited version of him that only wrote Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and maybe Farnham's Freehold or Sixth Column -- is to a certain brand of conservative science fiction writer what Ronald Reagan is to a certain brand of conservative in general: A plaster idol whose utility at this point is as a vessel for a certain worldview, regardless of whether or not Heinlein (or Reagan, for that matter) would subscribe to that worldview himself.

At the market very late

You find the best things on Metafilter:

http://www.newsfromme.com/2014/05/08/at-the-market-very-late/

 "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore."

Superpowers that really exist

Nice post on BoingBoing about real superpowers, in the sense of abilities that exist in nature in some animals.  But the best one is a real mutation that has occurred in humans:

 There have been at least two documented cases of a mutation in humans that triggers accelerated muscle growth and extraordinary strength right from birth; it happens when both copies of a myostatin-producing gene are defective, is extremely rare, and no one knows what the long term health consequences are. Having said that…the child in whom the mutation was first identified could, at age four, hold two 6.6 lb weights with his arms extended. That’s the equivalent of 3 litres of water. In each hand.

Full story:
http://boingboing.net/2014/04/30/6-superpowers-that-really-exis.html?utm_campaign=moreatbbmetadata&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=boingboing.net

Men's violence and the monster myth

"One of the most disturbing moments of the past eighteen months of my life was hearing my wife’s killer form a coherent sentence in court. Jill had been murdered almost six months earlier..."

http://whiteribbonblog.com/2014/04/17/the-danger-of-the-monster-myth/

This story is interesting and inspiring. The writer lost his wife to a rapist and murderer who basically fits the 'lone rapist' idea. But it made him want to make the point that usually this is not at all what happens, that if your assumption is that the fellow who's going to do people harm is some OTHER, some MONSTER, you're working from wrong ideas that won't help you; that we need to confront that it's all of us, it's the guys next door, it's people in your workgroup, who do the violence that we see every day.

Also of interest was his point that folks would often tell him they hoped the perpetrator would get raped in prison, and how that struck him as wrong, as requiring a kind of infinite loop of rapists to punish each other.

Found, of course, through the ever-awesome Metafilter.

How to say you're sorry

I'm sure there are a lot of guides to this, but this one is wrapped in an engaging blog post from a teacher, who adopted the idea to teach to young students, starting from the idea that, "kids today aren't being properly taught how to apologize."

Well, nobody taught me how to apologize properly either. This method includes several useful ideas, and the discussion shows you how it can make a difference in both the apologizer's future behavior and the relationship between apologizer and apologizee.

I'm not at all sure apologizee is a word.

http://www.cuppacocoa.com/a-better-way-to-say-sorry/

_The Rinse_ by Gary Phillips

This graphic novel rather reminds me of Brubaker's _Criminal_ series, which is one of my favorites. The story here deals with a money launderer, on a caper that tests his ability to be an honest man in a dishonest world. That's his charm, and Phillips manages to sell the idea of his money launderer with a heart of gold, mostly by making many of the other characters into scary scumbags. I enjoyed every minute of reading this book, and when I finished it, I picked it up and read it a second time. Highly recommended.

Rejecting incremental change in a quest to make sci-fi a reality -- an interesting perspective

In _The Atlantic_, Robinson Meyer talks about Google's 'Google X' projects and how trying to emulate sci-fi could be limiting Google's imagination.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/04/google-wants-to-make-science-fiction-a-reality-and-that-s-limiting-their-imagination/360699/

Key idea: they're only choosing projects that make big sweeping changes and actively rejecting incremental changes. That seems counter to how real change tends to work. Meyer's comments though are an interesting perspective on techological change and sci-fi's vision of it.