It’s just a phaser we’re going through

The main weapons in Star Trek are phaser beams – as I understand it, they’re beams of light which are “in phase”, thereby packing a hell of a destructive punch (I imagine a kind of super-laser).

Now, when the good ship Enterprise fires at an enemy ship and misses (which seems to happen more often than not), the beams just keep going on past the target. And on, and on, and on …

And they’ll keep going on until they eventually do hit something. That might not happen for a couple of centuries, and in another part of the galaxy entirely.

That doesn’t seem to worry them at all, though it would worry me that a missed shot today could, in a hundred or a thousand years’ time, hit a ship or a planet belonging to a culture that didn’t even exist at the time that I fired the shot, and that a future war could come from that – the culture would probably blame its neighbours rather than someone from ancient times half a galaxy away.

I mean, you could put a “stop” on a photon torpedo – if it don’t hit anything within a set time, it deactivates or (since the mass of the torpedo itself, travelling at speed, would be enough to severely damage anything it collided with) self-destructs into sufficiently tiny safe fragments.

But how do you set a self-destruct on a beam of light?

Flushed with irritation

I’m pretty easy-going, but I do have one absolute house-rule: in fact I feel so strongly about it that I have a sign on my bathroom wall: “Please close the toilet lid before you flush”.

It may seem petty or overly fussy for me to ask people to do this, and especially to go to the lengths of actually typing out and printing a notice, then sticking it to the wall above the tank, but consider this ….

When water splashes down into water, other water is thrown up in reaction. Everyone must have experienced this for themselves, or at least seen this effect in those amazing pictures where water is captured falling into water, and throwing up a beautiful crown of water in response. (Found one such and added it: it's not what I was actually looking for, but it's what I actually found.)

This reaction also applies to toilets. When you flush the toilet, water falls into water, and tiny droplets of water are thrown up from the bowl and get into the air – which you then breathe in.

This also applies to anything that you’ve just put into the toilet.

And, in my house, it’s not just you that would breathe in these tiny airborne droplets of your urine, fæces or vomit! If you really want to inhale microscopic fragments of your own bodily wastes, do it in your own home, not mine.


And it’s not just an inhalation hazard. Eventually the droplets would settle out of the air – onto everything within range.

I read somewhere that one’s toothbrush should be stored at least six feet away from the toilet. This seems to indicate that six feet is the radius of the “fallout zone”. Which means that not only my toothbrush should be six feet away from the toilet: also my face flannel, body scrubs, towels …

Just think of it: you could be brushing your teeth, or washing and drying your face or body with something that holds microscopic fragments of your own piss – or even worse, someone else’s!

The moving pendulum

“The moving pendulum swings, and having swung, swings back”

I can’t remember when this idea or concept first occurred to me, but it’s been unconsciously building and developing, until I think I can now express it (fairly!) coherently.

The “moving pendulum” seems to be a natural consequence of Newton’s “equal and opposite reaction” – and it applies to other than pendula, too.

It also applies to people, on national, cultural, social, group and individual levels.

A repressive culture holds the pendulum unnaturally far to one side; the longer and higher it’s held back, the more extreme the release reaction will be. when that pressure is eventually (and usually suddenly) released. (I can remember watching the Berlin Wall come down, and hoping that the newly-united Germany wouldn’t let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction – so I was sort of thinking about this at least twenty years ago!)

A culture of repression suddenly fails, and the pendulum, having been held back so far and for so long, swings to the opposite extreme: this provokes a reactionary backlash, which provokes a counter-backlash, and so on, and on, and on …

Each time the pendulum swings, it will move almost as far in the opposite direction, and almost as far as that back again – and the higher and the longer the pendulum is held to one side, the more violent the reaction will be when it’s finally released.

Note “almost as far”. As the pendulum continues to swing, the wild oscillations will gradually lose momentum and settle down into a regular rhythm. If given the chance!

The counter-reaction will want to hold the pendulum back: maybe not quite as high as it was before, but in the same general area of its previous locked-down position.

And the people who enjoy the free-swinging will oppose that and, in the joy of being able to move at last, will move too far the other way.

And so we proceed by a series of wild oscillations: first too far in one direction, then too far in the other.
The pendulum isn’t given the time to settle down to a regular rhythm; it keeps getting bumped and jolted.

Swinging 60s from post-war austerity …
Edwardian extravagance from Victorian prudery …
Convent girls becoming sex kittens …
Poor people winning the lottery and becoming spend-a-holics ….
Laddish yobbism from the backlash to New Men which waas itself a backlash from Macho Men …
And laddette yobbism, too …
Russians harking back wistfully to the Communist regime, because the system collapsed rather than slowly dissolving, and capitalism came as one hell of a culture shock to most of them …

People can’t really handle too much change too quickly; we want stability, even if it’s a stability of repression: we might not have liked it, but at least we knew where we were then.


As I’ve said elsewhere, I have no formal science education (we did a year of basic science at my grammar school, then a year of separate biology, chemistry and physics, but girls weren’t exactly encouraged to pursue these classes after that – we were girls, what did we need to know about science other than the “domestic” variety? [This has to be a topic for a future rant!])

Wilful misuse of words

I’m fed up with hearing that something or someone is “almost unique”.

“Unique” does not mean “very special” or “very unusual”.

It means “one of a kind, with nothing else exactly like it anywhere in the world”.

The word is not a qualifier, it is an absolute. There are no grades or shades of uniqueness: a person or a thing is unique, or it is not.


And I’m equally fed up with hearing something described as the “ultimate” book, music CD, or hair preparation.

“Ultimate” does not mean “latest” or “best”.

It means “last, final, utmost” – “the ultimate deterrent”,
“our ultimate destiny” – though people don’t usually say, “The ultimate bus stop on the route”!

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind an “ultimate diet book” if it really WAS going to be the last diet book ever!


******
Note: I’m rather freely defining the words whose common usage I’m having a go at, cos my dictionaries are packed for a house move!

You can go into Google [other search options are available!] and type “define: unique” [without the quotes] if you don’t own a dictionary yourself or can’t be bothered to find it and look up the words – though most of the “define: ultimate” hits seem to confirm the common misuse of the word.

God Help America

I posted the following question on Yahoo Answers, exactly as it is here, complete with typos that I've only just noticed!:


"Whny not a pre-emptive strike ON the USA?

The USA, apparently, believes it has the right to invade countries that might have caused it military or terrorist problems if left unchecked.

It assumes the right to "strike first" to prevent harm to the homeland

in that case, would it object if other countries, who (no doubt with just as much if not even more justification) believe that the USA will pose a future threat to their homelands, were to invade the USA before it had the chance to do it to them?

After all, there's an old saying about sauce for the goose ..."

**********

there were eight answers: one of them was this, exactly as i t apprears here:

"AMERICA HAS NEVER STARTED A WAR...and THEY HAVE NEVER OCCUPIED A COUNTRY OR TAKEN ANYTHING FROM IT!

WE WERE INVADED if you don't REMEMBER"

***********
to which my response was:

"no need to shout! and I wonder what books you learned your history from?!"

*****

Can you believe that that got voted as "Best Answer" by two people? [if it were voted in by one, I'd suspect the person who wrote that answer voted for himself]

but is that really what people are taught in the USA? in school, in the media, on tv and radio and newspapers? is that The Great American Version Of History?

if that's the case, then I can only repeat the comment I made on the YA page at the time -"if that's the best answer, then God Help America!"

And God help the rest of the world, cos it's dickheads like this that elect the ones who have their fingers on the biggest nuclear trigger in the world!


here's the page url: dunno if it'll work on click, or if you'll need to copy and paste it into the address box:
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AnhsEd3mpda2y5.AjDJUCeohBgx.;_ylv=3?qid=20091218194214AA2D6LG

Trial or justice?

I’ve noticed a worrying trend recently in the US (though it’s creping to our side of the Atlantic), in which politicians law enforcement officers and other official spokespersons talk glibly about “bringing criminals to justice.”

This is impossible, and they should be forcibly prevented from saying it.

What they should talk about is “bringing criminals to trial”.

Trial, Not “justice”. The two words do not mean the same thing at all, and they should not be used as if they did.

A trial is a physical entity. Justice is an abstract moral ideal. You can’t “bring people to mercy”.

(In the same vein, you can’t have “a war on terror” any more than you can have “a war on any other extreme emotion”).

“Trial” and “Justice” are not interchangeable – maybe they should be, and maybe in an ideal world they would be, but this is not an ideal world and the former is not an automatically synonym for the latter.

But it implies that every trial will be fair, and that justice will be done in every case.

Oh, really? Then how come we get so many retrials because of miscarriages of justice?

Pagan explanation for the Scout Association

I reverence the earth.
I reverence life – all life.
I reverence all creation.
I reverence the Creator.
I reverence the gifts
of the Goddess
in every aspect
of life.

I value the changing
of the seasons,
the differing beauties
of each new day;

I value everyone's uniqueness,
the shared joys
of working beside others,
discovering unities
in our differences.

I value myself,
and my role in life,
and my place in
the world.

I value life
in all its forms,
and respect it,
and do my best
not to bring harm
to any part of if.

I value my right to choose
my own path through life.

Everyone picks the path
that seems best
to them.

This is mine.



So tell me: exactly which part of this makes me a pædophile?


*****

Earliest date I can find for this is April 2007.
-------------------------------------

I started in Scouting in the mid-70s – the youngest in our family was a boy, so mum took him to Cubs; they needed help, so she joined in, then dad did, then …

Over the following eighteen-plus years I trained and qualified as both a Cub Scout and a Scout leader.

In the late 90s I had to take some time out to get my head sorted – I was under a lot of stress and suffering deep depression, partly due to trying to resist admitting to myself that I could no longer honestly call myself “a Christian” and that “pagan” would be more accurate.

By the early 2000s I was feeling well enough to want to rejoin – only in the Scout Fellowship (retired and other people who don’t work directly with the kids, but help out in the background at district events, etc), to see how I got on with that before I tried going deeper.

Apart from anything else, I’d become visually impaired and didn’t know how well I’d be able to cope with a bunch of energetic kids when I couldn’t see them clearly. But I thought it’d be interesting for the kids – and other leaders – to have a disabled leader, to discuss the differences.

On the form I had to fill in there was a question on religious/spiritual direction. Scouting insists that members have a spiritual leaning: agnostics can join, but atheists can’t.

I put “pagan” in the space provided – I was advised to put “agnostic” or even “atheist”, but thought that, for once I wanted to be totally honest – besides, I thought that it might be interesting, for kids – and leaders – to discuss this difference, too.

The district secretary told me that he’d contacted Scout HQ to ask what kind of promise I should make (the standard Scout promise is a Christian one, but they have other variants for other faiths). He wanted to know if there was a pagan one.

Their immediate response? I had to be “kept away from the kids at all costs”.

Never mind that I already had 18+ years as a Cub and Scout Leader with not even the suspicion of a shadow of a doubt against my character; never mind that I had never acted with anything other than the utmost probity towards the young people in my care.

I was a pagan, and therefore a pervert who’d drag the kids off to the woods to perform satanic rituals on them whenever we went camping.

They obviously didn’t, and probably still don’t, have any idea what “a pagan” actually is, and they probably never bothered to try to find out.

They didn’t contact me to ask, I’m not aware of them contacting the district secretary (who’d known me for almost all those 18+ years) to find out what kind of a person I was.

They didn’t even know enough to know that “Satan” is a Christian invention and that only Christian sickoes perform “Satanic rituals”.

So I wrote the above poem (apart from the question at the end, which I added later) and sent it to them, but I doubt that they ever bothered to read it: they’d made up their minds, why confuse them with the truth?

I understand that children and young adults need to be protected from potential predators, and I thoroughly approve – I’d been through police checks to become a leader before, and I’d come up with the scent of roses. Children have to be protected from perverts.

But why automatically assume that anyone who doesn’t follow the dry, dusty, colourless road of a well-trampled mainstream religion must be a pervert?

Why didn’t they bother to check what form my spiritual beliefs actually took before they made up their middle-class Christian minds?

When the district secretary told me what they had said, he laughed: he knew me, he’d known me for nearly two decades; he knew how ridiculous the very idea was.

But, sadly, the Scout Association didn’t know, and very probably still doesn’t.

There have, unfortunately, been some instances of Scout leaders sexually abusing the children in their care: I bet most of those leaders had “Christian” on their forms.