EARTHQUAKE!!....!!

We used to have earthquakes fairly often when I was growing up. For some reason, they almost always seemed to happen at night, which meant that they woke you up. I distinctly remember being woken up several times by a gentle rocking of my bed. The first thing that happens with a night earthquake is that you have no idea what's going on - you just woke up, remember. After a second or so, though, you suddenly realize with a thrill that it's an earthquake. If it wasn't too big, you could just lie there and feel the rocking slowly subside. It was always a combination of excitement and comfort to me, somehow.

Then for some reason, they seemed to happen a lot less frequently. There were only a couple that I recall over the last ten years or so that are even worth mentioning. The biggest disappointment with fewer earthquakes, by the way, is you don't get to see the "earthquake guy" - this seismologist who ALWAYS came on tv to tell people what just happened. Here's a couple pictures of him:





Check out that moustache! That's his signature. Seriously. When he signs checks or something, he just dips his moustache in some ink and presses it on the paper.

Anyhow.... Over the last year or so, there'd been a few quakes out in the desert that were big enough to feel out here, but only because I work in a highrise - extra swaying, I guess. Alison had never felt one, so I kept asking her if she felt them, and she kept saying no. In fact, she said that she didn't believe in earthquakes - they were a myth created by Californians to keep people away. The last time she told me that was the day before the big Easter quake we had this year. Talk about a jinx! Of course, that was the biggest one that I've ever felt, so it was a rude introduction.

Now that she's experienced one, she hates them. She doesn't think that the ground (or a house) is supposed to just start moving like that. She has a point, but I have to say that I love 'em! They're my favorite natural disaster to experience in person by far.

My love of earthquakes coupled with Alison's visceral antipathy towards them led me to conduct an informal survey of my aquaintances to find out which one of us held the majority view. Interestingly, I found out that there is a HUGE correlation between one's attitude towards earthquakes and where one grew up. Nearly all of the native Californians enjoyed quakes, or at least were neutral. Nearly everyone from someplace else, though, hated them - often, even so that the mere thought of one gave them the willies.

To the loyal readers out there, I'd like to continue the survey - what do you think of earthquakes? Have you felt one?

And, more broadly, what's your favorite natural disaster? Does it matter where you're from or grew up? Shouldn't a tornado or an earthquake be just as terrifying (or exciting) whether you're from Oklahoma or California (or vice versa)?

The Nerdiness Scale

Nerd culture is thriving like never before. There was a time when, if you were a nerd, you only had physics experiments or "Lord of the Rings" to keep you entertained. Now there are dozens of TV channels containing nothing but nerd-friendly content. It is truly a golden age for Nerdish-Americans.

I've posted before about the differences between nerds, geeks, and dorks, so I won't go into that debate, hotly contested as it is within Nerdic America. Here I'm more interested in the degrees of nerdiness of various things. There is a spectrum, you see, from 1 (not at all nerdy) to 10 (holy cow, your comic book collection is about to topple over and bury you alive).

Let's take an example. I think we can all agree that "Star Trek" is pretty nerdy. Indeed, it's a sort of standard-bearer for Nerd culture, a touchstone by which people of other social strata are first exposed to the rich diversity of nerdania. But is it nerdier than "Babylon 5"? Ha ha (snort) ha ha -- yeah right, and Captain Pike had no ill effects from delta ray radiation on that J-class training ship! Ha ha (snort) ha ha ... gasp ... oh dear ... I need my inhaler ...

Basically, "Star Trek" is less nerdy than "Babylon 5" because non-nerds can watch and enjoy "Star Trek." It has considerably more crossover appeal than other fields of nerdology. At the same time, nerds can indeed get extremely over-nerdulated about "Star Trek," as we all know. The immense strength of its Nerdic following has to keep its score pretty high.

That's basically how the scale works -- you have to look at the balance between crossover appeal and nerditorial fervor. With those two criteria in mind, "Star Trek" gets a 6 out of 10 on the Nerdiness Scale. "Babylon 5" is easily a 9.

So, here are some other judgements:

"Star Wars": 4. As with "Star Trek," you can get extremely nerdified over "Star Wars." But I submit that "Star Wars" has more crossover appeal than "Star Trek," and has a smaller Nerdic subculture. Of course, comparing the "Star Trek" nerdiverse to "Star Wars"'s is a bit like saying Jessica Simpson is dumber than Paris Hilton -- you're talking about the two titans of their field. But "Star Trek" was the groundbreaker, and still the champion.

Now if you start talking about the "Star Wars" sub-subculture, the books and graphic novels and Web sites exploring Greedo's relationship with his mother or Darth Maul's favorite breakfast cereal, well, then you're getting into primo nerditacularity, possibly a 9 or 10.

"Doctor Who": 8. That's the score in the States, that is. In Britain, it gets probably a 5. In the States, you have to be a pretty hard-core Nerdist to watch "Doctor Who." I'm happy to say to say my particular nerdicacity stops at around a 6 or so, so I have never seen "Doctor Who."

"Doctor Who" has many factors pushing it in to top-flight, high-yield, weapons-grade, light sweet crude nerdilocity:

1. It's British. (Nerdites are often Anglophiles.)
2. It's on PBS. (related to no. 1)
3. It's sci-fi.
4. It's laughably cheap-looking sci-fi (as I am led to believe, anyway. I haven't seen it, remember? OK, once. But I only watched it because the Doctor's female hanger-on was real hot, and I was 13, and I would've watched an cat strangling competition if a hot chick was involved.)

"Monty Python": 5. As with "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," there's plenty of crossover appeal here. And it's not sci-fi, which lowers its score considerably.

But it has never really reached the mainstream masses in the States the way the two Star empires have. "Monty Python" crosses over not to Joe Sixpack and Jane Peoplemagazinereader but to Professor Van Nostrand and Chuckles McSlappy (a.k.a. smarties and comedians). That pushes it a bit higher on the scale.

My wife put this one best. She says that post-pubescent unathletic boys tend to go apeshit for "Monty Python" (particularly "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," of course). That's usually a prime sign of Grade-A nerdiciousness. But then many of those boys grow up to be relative non-nerds, maybe 3s or 4s on the scale. And there isn't a huge "Monty Python" nerdastic subculture -- there's not much in the way of fan fiction or action figure trading or sexual fantasies about Carol Cleveland. So that knocks it back a few points. The middle is a good place for it.

"Dungeons and Dragons": 10. I'm sorry, but D&D is really the ne plus ultra of nerdturbation. There's really no aspect that crosses over to legitimate society. There was a TV show once, I think, and some terrible movies that no one but the Nerdeviks saw. Really, the only way you can participate in Dungeons and Dragons is to take out some 20-sided dice, call yourself Mokdur the Impaler, buy some pewter figures of half-orcs, and let the nerdescence burst out of you like a primal scream.

And the nerdalaxy for D&D is massive and fervent. There are entire stores devoted to it, stores that may even be in your neighborhood and you don't even know it. They usually pose as normal storefronts, but if you innocently waltz in seeking out a nice lathe or some liquid aspartame, you will get suspicious and unfriendly looks from the shady, shifty-eyed characters shuffling within. You quickly get the hint, depart quietly, and immediately after you close the door behind you, you get the distinct feeling that a rumbling, growling mob has suddenly re-emerged from the shadows to light upon each other with adamantine battleaxes and Spells of Necrotic Termination.

I admit that I have met a few D&D adherents. I would never, of course, reveal their identities. It is their choice whether or not to come out of the closet and undergo the inevitable repercussions from a world that refuses to accept their lifestyles. I can only support them and hope that some day, somewhere, a society will be born that will permit grown men to freely and openly attack each other's Breastplates of Kaltar with the Orbs of Negative Energy that they have spent ther lives accumulating.

So that's the basic idea of the Nerdiness Scale. What other Nerdiflabiflubilations would you bring up, and where would you put them on the scale?

Why Are Religion and Science at Odds?

I mean, seriously, right? They almost never try to tackle the same questions. It's not like the Bible's all "And then God saith unto him, 'The carbon atom hath 243 electrons. Not six, like those jackass scientists say. I mean, who does those guys think they are? With their "methodical empirical testing" and "rigorous peer review" and "lifetimes devoted to assiduous and dispassionate study of minute concepts"? How could they know more about something than some guy who occasionally reads the Drudge Report?'"

I suppose I just revealed where my sympathies lie here. But I think religion gets unfairly sucked in to the real issue, which is "science vs. crazy paranoid conspiracy theorists." Take global warming, for example. So 99% of all scientists agree that it's a serious problem. And there's a huge percentage of Americans who don't believe in it, because ... why, exactly? Because it sounds scary? Because they read that a couple scientists, out of the thousands doing work on the topic, sweetened their numbers a bit once? So by that logic, if a few people steal office supplies, then no one has ever bought a stapler in the history of the world?

I'm getting off track here. I just get very frustrated with people who don't believe in established scientific principles for no good reason. Look, scientists spend their entire lives studying these things. They go through incredibly rigorous processes to test their theories, from the controls in each study to the aforementioned peer review, by which other scientists gleefully tear apart any weaknesses. This process has worked extremely well to develop the many principles that have since been used to create everything from iPods to McDonald's hamburgers (which are actually sophisticated alloys of magnesium and cat snot -- I'm sorry, did you not know that?)

I'm not suggesting you should believe every study that comes out. Be skeptical about most health-related ones, for example. (Broccoli is bad for you! Now it's good for you! Now it causes cancer! Now it kills cancer! Now it is cancer!) A single study doesn't prove much of anything. But when thousands of studies have been done, and all of them support something like global warming or evolution, you should probably start to think "hmm. There might be something to this. Maybe I don't exactly understand it, but maybe if very smart people who study it for a living all agree on it, well, it could be true!"

The global warming conspiracy theorists especially get to me. It's clearly such a serious problem, and these jackasses are still refusing to face it. I'm very scared, personally. I just read, for example, that photosynthesis decreases dramatically at temperatures above 86 degrees. That means plants can't grow nearly as well when it gets hotter. I think is a more serious problem than whether Obama may at some point raise taxes on the rich.

But the global warming naysayers apparently think it's all some kind of grand conspiracy by scientists. Have these idiots ever met a scientist? Scientists are all arrogant, super-argumentative assholes (present company excepted). They live to tear down other scientists' ideas. Bad concepts would not survive a day in that kind of pressure cooker.

And how exactly would this conspiracy work? Do you think all of the millions of scientists occasionally meet in some underground bunker and go "OK, lets make up something new. How about that the planet is getting hotter? Yeah, that's so crazy it just might work! Now all we have to do is write thousands of papers and keep an incredible internal discipline among the millions of us. All so we can write books that no one reads and Al Gore can make a moderately successful movie! It's pure genius! And besides, without global warming, what would we all do for a living? After all, there are is no other science to study."

This gets at a general distrust that Americans seem to have of experts. I don't get it. We refuse to believe the conclusions of people who are spend all their time studying something that we know nothing about. Wouldn't you think they might come up something more valid than we would?

Why do Americans think that they can have a valid opinion on everything, just by following their own gut feelings? Sometimes, you don't know enough to form an opinion. Sometimes, you have to assume that the experts are not completely insane, that they might have explored the issue in such depth that they might know more than you about it. I know, I'm talking crazy talk. After all, I work hard at the shop and support my family, so don't go telling me that protein kinases add phosphate groups to proteins! I know in my heart that what they really do is help angels fly.

And hopefully that got us back to religion vs. science, which is where I meant to go with all of this. My point was that the Bible doesn't even try to get into science. It gets into history and ethics, but not science. It doesn't say how God did stuff, just that he did. It doesn't say "And God made man, and he did it with a big ZAP and puff of smoke, in like, a second." Why couldn't He have sparked the genetic mutations that led to the formation of humans, etc.? If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. Why can't God work through the physical world to do His thing?

Basically, religion isn't about how things happen. Science explores how. Religion is about why things happen, and by whom. Science doesn't have anything to say about the deeper meaning of our lives, and doesn't pretend to. Science doesn't set forth moral principles, because that's not its job. Religion and science are working on completely different sets of questions.

I suppose this false religion vs. science dichotomy came about because of all the lame explanations that people spun out of religious worldviews and then accepted as holy fact. For instance, they once concluded that the Earth was at the center of the universe, because we're all so wonderfully delightful and God loves us mucho and everything. So when Galileo realized that that wasn't true, the religious authorities came down on him hard. But note that the Bible doesn't say anything about the Earth being at the center of the universe. This was just something people made up before there was science, and then awkwardly tied in to religion.

Or take the creation story, which is at the heart of current religion vs. science talk. Yes, it does actually say that God created everything, including humans, in six days. But c'mon, is that really the most important point here? The point is that God created things. As I said in my last post, people who take the Bible literally would have to also believe that it's OK to beat your slave within an inch of his life.

Do you really think God is up there saying "Yup, six days. If you don't believe that, then go to hell! Literally." I think He's more concerned with people believing in him, and knowing that He loves them. That seems to be more His bag.

Or with global warming - what do you think Jesus would say about it? Seriously. Do you think he would say, "Naw, it ain't true, because I saw this one thing on Fox News that said it was all a lie." I think Jesus would be a lot more interested in the moral dimension of it. That's more His thing. I think Jesus would be more like "You guys really should not be consuming so much that you're threatening to destroy my creation. How about living a bit more simply? It worked for me."

So let's stop assuming that religion and science are somehow at odds. They're not. They're in completely different realms, asking and answering completely different questions.

Page 56

A fun kind of game I found on Alison's grandma's blog, Z's World (did you know that grandmas could have blogs?!).

Rules:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like) along with these instructions on your blog or (if you do not have your own blog) in the comments section of this blog.
*Post a link along with your post back to this blog.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Edna Selan Epstein, The Attorney-Client Privilege and Work-Product Doctrine (5th ed. 2007)

In short, the attorney-client privilege is designed to protect a client's expectation of confidentiality regarding communications with his attorney. There has been no showing by Metro that, at the time the documents in question were generated, it had any intent or expectation that they would be concealed from its insurance carriers.

Ever Read the Bible?

I know I haven't. But I went to church every Sunday as a kid and went to lots of Sunday Schools and Bible Camps and Jesus Discos and all the rest of it. So I feel like I know the Bible pretty well. I even read a comic-book version of the whole Old Testament (Spoiler alert: Jesus dies in the end. And the Jews did it, in the billiard room, with the cross.)

But despite that exhaustive research, there are still some fun bits I missed somehow. For instance, there's a whole section of Exodus that lays out about a hundred amendments to the Ten Commandments.

Some are great. Exodus 22:25 states "If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not be like a moneylender; charge him no interest." So basically, all bankers are breaking God's law. Awesome!

Some are not so great. Exodus 20:21-22 states "If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, because the slave is his property." Hmmm. So those people who think homosexuality is a sin because of a few Bible passages ... they obviously must also be in favor of beating slaves within an inch of their lives, no? Or perhaps this Exodus passage is a metaphor. A metaphor for ... ummm .... c'mon, liberal preachers, do something with this one. Stretch this somehow into a lesson about modern life.

No, but really, a lot of this stuff was really revolutionary for its time. You gotta remember what ancient life was like. It was brutality spiced with sadism, with a little mauling on the side. Rome was the most advanced civilization of the ancient world, and it was a place in which entertainment meant watching lions eat people. The Roman gods and other related polytheistic systems didn't really impart morality at all -- they were just more powerful versions of humans whose whims you supposedly had to appease if you wanted to get anywhere.

A lot of the Exodus rules represent a definite step forward from all that. Exodus 21:12: "Anyone who strikes a man and kills him will surely be put to death." So despite the harsh punishment, it implies some value to human life. Or here's a better one -- Exodus 22:21: "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt." (But Mexicans, of course, they're a different story. You can oppress them all you like. After all, they're not from Egypt!)

So yeah, anyway, I don't have any great overarching point here -- I'm just saying that the Bible is fun. It's totally dope, kids! Word!

Solutions to Baseball's Problems

Baseball doesn't really have any problems, really. I mean not like Zimbabwe or Bernie Madoff or beeper salesmen have troubles. Baseball is wildly successful and is rolling in so much money that it real worst problem is paper cuts. And I should state that baseball is one of my favorite things in the world. But like everything, it has a few problems that could be fixed to make it a bit better. For example:

Problem: There's a crazy disparity in income between large-market teams and small-market teams. This is been the source of much hand-wringing in baseball for a long time now. A lot of half-measures have been taken, like revenue sharing, in which the small-market teams get an infusion of cash from the rich ones.

But this stinks because it enables the Florida Marlins to basically tank each year and still make a profit. All they have to do is keep their payroll artifically low, and revenue sharing will ensure that they make a profit even if they don't sell a single ticket all year. How come tea partiers haven't come out against revenue sharing? If that ain't communist, I don't know what is.

I should note that the rest of the small-market teams make a real effort to win. And because some of them have had some success lately, the clamor for reform has actually died down a bit. But the fact of the matter is still that if the Milwaukee Brewers develop a player like Prince Fielder, they can hope to keep him for, at best, the first half of his career, after which he's going to sign with the Yankees for ten gabillion dollars. There's not too much the Brewers can do about that -- The Yankees serve a massive group of people, both to watch the games and attend them, and the Brewers just don't.

Solution: The away team gets half the gate at each game. So when the Royals visit the Yankees, they get half of the proceeds for ticket sales for the games they play. Why shouldn't they? They're on the bill too. They make half the effort on the field. The home team still keeps all the money from concessions, merchandise, TV rights, etc. Maybe the home team could keep 55% to cover the salaries of the grounds crew and announcer and hilarious fellow in the chicken suit. Whatever - regardless, the Royals organization should be paid for their contribution to those individual games.

The Yankees would hate this, of course. The Yankees make lot more in gate receipts than the Royals do. But really, the big difference-maker between the Yankees and Royals is the size of their TV contracts, and that won't change. Under this plan, the Yankees would still make more money than everyone else. But it won't be quite as lopsided. And it's an elegant, simple plan, without any of the clumsy, artificiality of revenue sharing. It sure won't allow the Marlins to tank.

So what if the Yankees refuse to give up half their gate? Then the Royals say "OK, fine, then we're not coming. Good luck filling your schedule." Simple. That would never happen, of course, because the owners are all a bunch of rich old white men who spend their time scratching each other's backs with backscratchers made of million-dollar bills. Their enemy is the players, so if the plan doesn't involve screwing the players somehow, they won't do a thing.

Problem: Games are too slow. This is the first thing that every baseball hater says about our beloved game, so just the mention of it makes us baseball lovers want to shoot them very, very slowly. But there are times when I have to agree. When you're watching Nomar Garciaparra foul off the tenth pitch of the at-bat, and then leave the batter's box, remove all his clothes, put them all back on, tap his head ten times, wash his hands fifteen times, do twenty Hail Marys, and then finally step back in the box, you can't help but think "Hurry the hell up!!!!"

Solution: I've already let the cat out of the bag on this one. The solution is to not automatically let the batter leave the batter's box between pitches. Once he enters the batter's box, he has to stay there until he gets a hit or walks hit by a pitch or falls down or gets eaten by a monster. If he wants to leave the box in mid-at-bat, he has to ask the umpire. The umpire doesn't have to say yes. This would be an easy fix -- this is already what batters have to do after the pitcher gets set. Just extend it to the whole at-bat.

Of course, you still have slow pitchers. I think you might have to just have a time limit between pitches. If you don't deliver the ball in time, you've just thrown a ball. That's not the most elegant solution, but hey, I can't think of everything.

Problem: Umpires are human beings. I'm not one to blame umpires for missed calls. It's extremely hard to make split-second calls over split-second plays 100% correctly all the time. Poor umpires only get noticed the 1% of the time they miss a call.

So the point is, I feel bad for umpires. So bad that I want to fire them all and replace them with computerized systems. They already have such a computerized system for judging whether pitches are balls are strikes. Why not just let that system take over? A little noise can come up immediately if it's a ball, and a different one if it's a strike. No missed calls, no arguing.

As for tags, catches, home run calls, etc., there have to be similar systems that could judge those and spit out a response immediately. That's the key, of course -- it has to make the call immediately. You can't have some guy in a booth looking at instant replays.

This one especially will probably not catch on with baseball fans. Their likely response will be "But umpires are a part of the game!" True, I would argue, but not a good part. I want competition to be as fair as humanly, or if need be, robotically, possible. I don't enjoy having human error play such a large role. I'll miss the umpires at first, but I'll get used to the new system and eventually enjoy it more because I wouldn't have to wonder what would have happened if calls went the other way. And that's what it's all about -- what's most fun to watch. And no, I wouldn't want the players all replaced by robots. That would not be fun to watch. (Or would it ...)

In general, true baseball fanatics tend to think of the sport as a perfectly wrought machine, one for which a single alteration would ruin everything. It ain't. It's entertainment, and can always be made to be more entertaining.

Other sports do it. There was a time when basketball had no shot clock. At the end of games, the team that was ahead would just sit there dribbling, trying to run out the clock. They instituted the shot clock to prevent that, and now ... well, now basketball games end with a bunch of tedious fouls and time outs ... but anwyay, that's still better than watching some schmuck dribble for twenty minutes.

So yeah, those are my proposals. They will never, ever, ever be enacted. Oh well.

Review of a Show You've Never Heard of and Don't Care About

I was excited to see the new show "Future Food," on Planet Green. If you don't get Planet Green, it's a station that ostensibly only deals with eco-friendly stuff. So of course it's a channel that I don't watch much but always feel like I should.

"Future Food" sounded promising. It's a reality show, of sorts, about a cutting-edge Chicago restaurant that uses unconventional, scientific means to create new foods. They'll use liquid nitrogen, for example, to see if they can make watermelon into a passable substitute for tuna. You know, that kind of thing.

I'm a big fan of food. I'm addicted to it, really, eating it almost every day. I'm not so into quantity as I am into quality. And I love trying new, weird foods. That's adventure for me. Put me in an El Savadoran/Norwegian hot dog-flavored ice cream place and I'm happy as a clam with butter sauce. Some people go climb mountains or drive racecars or beat sharks with a bat or whatever they do -- I go to exotic restaurants and try food from countries that I didn't even realize had food.

So eating at this Chicago restaurant of "Future Food" would be a dream come true for me. Watching the restaurant's chefs screw around, unfortunately, was not. Like too many chefs, they're overly intense and competitive, perverting cooking, this ancient and inherently beautiful art, into an opportunity to high-five each other and scream obscenities.

They awkwardly stuff competition into everything they do. In one episode, they made some unusual crepes and then challenged this very nice and respectable Frenchman, an acknowledged crepe master, to a crepe-off. These schmucks talked a lot about "kicking his ass" while the nice old Frenchman smiled gamely. I felt ashamed for America.

And then there's the fact that these guys are really, really, dweeby. When Goldberg and Mick Foley scream obscenities and high-five each other after "beating up" the Undertaker, you're kinda like, "OK, that's dumb, but look at them. What else are they supposed to do?" But when pencil-thin, googly-eyed dorks scream obscenities and high-five after making some really tasty crepes, you're kinda like "Oh c'mon now. You're not fooling anyone. Go home and do play some D&D like you're supposed to. Another high-five and you'll probably injure yourself."

Side topic for a second -- is it still OK to high-five? I mean, if you're Joe Mauer and you just hit a ten-run home run to beat the Yankees in the World Series, yes, high-fiving makes sense. But are mere mortals still really allowed to high-five? I can't really think of an opportunity in which it would be a viable action for me. But I could be wrong about this one.

At any rate, I also worry that this is the first step in Planet Green slipping away their main mission, a la the History Channel. In case you didn't hear, the History Channel does not actually show anything remotely relating to history nowadays. It's kinda like how MTV doesn't show music videos. The History Channel instead shows reality shows about people with weird jobs -- ice road truckers, ghost hunters, shark-beaters-with-a-bat, that kind of thing. These "Future Food" folks were trying to devise ways to waste less food or buy less food that had large carbon footprints, so there was some eco-stuff in there. I'm just worried that a few years from now Planet Green will be showing "Ghost Truckers," a show about people who investigate haunted trucks and discover that when they pulled him from the twisted, burning wreck, he looked like ... this!