All posts by Steve

Free Rover!

Space

~5 days ago… no post yet?

Now this is science. Next time I sink all four wheels of my car into deep sand in the desert near Blythe (as I have done twice in the past), maybe they’ll have published the amazing driving techniques I can use to drive away without getting out of the car, digging under the car with my hands, jacking up the car, digging to get the wheels uncovered, and putting stuff under the wheels to drive away. OTOH, I’ve done it in about four hours, versus five weeks. (Note: Adam Houston was along for one of these adventures.)

How to make your plants sing

Technology

I bet it was unrelenting brown thumbery and general frustration with the higher-level voodoo that is biochemistry that led these engineers to master their foliage in ways no horticulturist, nor the foliage itself, could have ever imagined. The hills really could be alive with the sound of music.

Training young capitalist pigs?

Literature

Help me here.

It is an odd thing to have one of your favorite mythical worlds spun in an unpleasant way. I came across a mind-twisting article on Harry Potter, the capitalist pig. Nevermind that J.K. Rowling is richer than God now; the fantastical world she created was a lift to my spirit every time I entered it. Maybe it is because I have been raised in a competitive, capitalist environment all my life, and furthermore find competitiveness and also greed to be intrinsic to human nature in all but, as we would say, the most “saintly” among us (when thinking of the greed aspect), but I can’t fathom how the competitive drive could be conquered on a large scale within the real world, and how that would even be healthy. Competition causes us to rise to greater challenges, and without the constant battle, we would be complacent and jaded.

Not that I don’t tire of the battle to survive many days… especially when paying rent and other bills. In the U.S. the balance is probably shifted too much toward a “lord of the flies” mentality. And the consumerist aspect of our culture truly is poisonous. The latter and former things are somehow conflated, though, to make wholly “evil” the very process by which evil is battled in Harry Potter’s world.

I welcome comments that address the mindset of the essay’s author. (Does this explain the lukewarm reception of Lance Armstrong by the French and other Europeans? This year he has certainly approached Le Tour with the mindset of dominance.)