"The Quantum Mechanic" submitted for e-book publishing!

As the link at right indicates, The Quantum Mechanic is soon to be published as an e-book. I took care of all the reformatting this weekend and everything is in order, all that remains is for the good folks over at Smashwords to give it the final go-ahead (I'm #211 in queue as of right now).

EDIT: As of right the Hell-ass now, The Quantum Mechanic is ready for sampling and purchase as an e-book at Smashwords! You can read 55% of it for free on your e-reader to see if you like the new fourth chapter and the way I've integrated the un-deleted scenes. Also, I've verified that it works Stanza on my iPod (I don't have a Kindle, and I can't get the .mobi-wranglin' app to work properly... though I may be doin it rong). While it works, so to speak, there are issues. The acknowledgments aren't displaying properly, and neither does my citation of a Carl Sagan quote in the Foreword. Like, this stuff is there in my source document, something just got bollocksed up in the conversion process. I'm looking into it, but the rest of the free preview (all the way up through the end of "A Little Piece of Heaven") appears to work perfectly.

Of course, if you want to read it now, you still can! The way Smashwords works, once you own a book you can download it infinitely (so you can keep up on any later updates at no additional cost, and they'll be posted here). It's all DRM-free, too. While the book is technically "copyright me," it's copyleft in spirit, which means that while there's no substitute for showing your appreciation in a "rent and groceries" sort of way, I honestly care more about getting my ideas out to people who enjoy them than I care about making money for my hobby. (This is why there are no license notes.)

DOUBLE-EDIT: BWAHAHA! OK, so the second edition is uploaded, converted, and approved! (The same link above still works.) The problem? I have the same problems. The acknowledgments still don't display properly, and neither does the Sagan attribution in the foreword. However, there is an exciting new development! You see, these problems happen if you view the e-book with white text on a black background - but they don't happen if you view the e-book with black text on a white background! What the shit-fuck-tits is going on here?!

No, seriously, if anyone knows what the Hell-ass-balls I can do to fix this, I'm all ears. I'm just pissed and too lazy to look it up right now. I'll continue to look into it once I get some actual fresh content up, but I will be tremendously grateful to anyone who's able to bring a solution (or even a suggestion) to me.

I should probably say something about this...

Per KarateMonkey's request, I'm making The Quantum Mechanic into an e-book because CreateSpace doesn't do this, and I want people to be able to buy and read my book however they want. But they have a thirty-five page style guide, and I really want to understand the process so I can do all the reformatting intelligently and at one stroke (without paying someone else to do it), but going through all this is enough to drive me to drink.

Oh, who the Hell am I kidding? The fact that it's Saturday drives me to drink!

No, but seriously, I'm doing this e-book thing good an' proper, and then it's on to talk about The Authoritarians. Because that book makes me feel really naive. And I just finished it, so I really wanna talk about it.

Oh, and I also have a very important commitment to killing foreigners on the internet with my brother A tonight. I mean, they're different from us. We can't abide that shit!

The Importance of Perspective, or: Who WOULDN'T Want a Personal Slave?

I'd like to say two things up front: first, that I definitely sympathize with those who suffer from ennui, from wanting more out of life, from a numbing dissatisfaction with the way things are going; second, that I don't know these women from Eve and their situations are probably more complicated than they've even openly and candidly admitted.

That said, Rant: On.

This past Sunday, I read Delia Lloyd complain that modern life is hard work. Fucking surprise! I read two of the pieces she linked by Sandra Tsing Loh, one transparently escapist fantasy which I can't tell if Loh actually pines after or not, and one rather longer slice-of-life lament which smacks of teenage angst in middle-aged terms. I'm sympathetic to Loh, I really am - but for shit's sake, this lady has some growing up to do.

The cockles of my heart are not nearly so opening to Lloyd (and that ain't much to begin with), probably for this bit alone:

...here's what we ate: cold pasta covered with leftover Tikka Masala sauce (tomato sauce inexplicably AWOL in kitchen cupboard), some soggy carrots cooked four hours earlier for kids' dinner, and the coup de grace: canned sardines. Yum.

This may not strike you, General Reader, as particularly infuriating, but what you have to consider is context, which at present means, "whatever the Hell I was thinking about five minutes earlier." In this situation, the context is that I had just woken up from dreaming about snowmobiling, which I have never done but long to do, and I marveled at the fact that our intellects have afforded us as a species the opportunity to transform what would normally be a difficult and harrowing experience (i.e. trekking across harsh, snowy landscapes) into leisure activity. Awesome! And while thinking of this, I assembled for myself a breakfast of leftover chili with fried eggs and Tabasco sauce mixed in, topped with cheddar cheese and green chiles for garnish. It was delicious, and it was reheated leftovers.

So I hope you understand what I mean when I say that I find Delia Lloyd's attitude comparable to a moist, aromatic pile of dogshit. It's unpleasant to step in, to look at, to smell, just to be around in general.

Seriously, this whining fuck-stain goes through a busy day doing things that most people regard as hallmarks of success, and complains at the end that she wants someone else to go through the boring parts so she doesn't have to. What is this happy horse-shit? She engages in a day's work of her chosen career path, has the resources to meet the wants and needs of her children, spends some quality time involving herself in her children's lives, then does a little more work before having a late dinner with her husband. Note that she does not reheat it at her option. And rather than just, oh, hire someone, she pines after someone to do the extra business of cooking, cleaning, and clothes-shopping for free? I am simply baffled by the... the... I dunno, the presumption of affluence, I guess? Maybe just the laziness.

To be fair, I'll bet she wasn't thinking about the day-to-day lives of our genetic ancestors as she went about her business. I'll bet she wasn't thinking as she prepared that day's meal, as I had been, of the marvels found in nearly every kitchen that allow us to prepare and store food from miles away, grown and prepared by someone we'll probably never meet, for consumption whenever we fucking feel like it. And I'll bet she also wasn't thinking about how children were our first retirement plans, about how the shotgun approach to child-rearing is regrettably still a necessity in certain parts of the world, or about how indulging the desires of said progeny is a luxury afforded to a precious and relatively modern few in the grander scope of our shared history.

In short, to understand Mrs. Lloyd's perspective, I have to concede an awful lot to general thoughtlessness. It's just a goddamned shame that she can't be more thoughtful in appreciating her life.

Then again, I guess I'm fucking lucky. I mean, my father taught me how to clean floors and sinks, but he also taught me the art of hinokishin. When I punched a hole through my bedroom door, he disciplined me by teaching me how to cut a door to size and hang it, making me fix the mess I had made. He taught me to thank lightning-struck trees for the wood they gave us for carving walking sticks, and to leave campsites better than I found them because it's the right thing to do and I'm not any more important than the next person to come along. And I guess Rant is Off now, because I find myself feeling sorry for these sorts of people who fantasize for something more without appreciating the full value of what's right the fuck in front of them.

IT CAME IT CAME IT CAME!

OK, I know I said I wouldn't put anything up here until tomorrow, and that was coincidentally when the newest proof of TQM was supposed to arrive, but IT CAME TODAY SQUEEEEEEEEE!

Buy my book!

Yay yay yay! I'm an actual author now an' I can get money for the story I wrote an' everything! I'm so happy!

OK, but seriously, buy my book. This is probably the only time I'll be shamelessly and unapologetically pimping for myself, because now there's a link to buy it over in yonder sidebar. (Please buy my book!)

It's a particularly French flavor of boredom.

Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

My inspiration has been severely inadequate this past month. I desperately hope this has gone largely unnoticed, but I don't wanna kid myself. I've been trying to make myself keep writing, but everything I write just looks like shit to me.

So: new plan! Since I am by nature a compulsive writer, and typically can't not write, I am going to take my best friend's suggestion and try to recharge my creativity batteries - I shall accomplish this by not writing anything at all for an entire week. I don't know if I can go that long without saying something about something. I mean, I have the internet, and the State of the Union Address is tonight. There will be no shortage of things to write about! But seven days from today, I should be chomping at the bit to just get my opinion out there, rather than getting depressed over my complete inability to articulate an idea in a persuasive or interesting manner.

Wish me luck!

Poison for Your Brain: The Stupid, It Burns (from both barrels)!

So I skimmed over PZ's take on Adams' childish whining, but then Rhodopsin sent me Orac's scathing excoriation and I just had to read up. I even gave Natural News my e-mail address just so I could see the whole damn thing.

This is Poison for Your Brain, and not something serious like, uhh... something... else... so I'm just going to up & say that this guy's showing more ego defenses than Jessica Rabbit shows leg. (Pro Tip: that would be, like, all of them.) Can we go through the list? I think we can!

We've got delusional projection, denial, distortion, maybe splitting (that one's a bit more of a stretch); the whole article is a case in acting out, there's clearly some fantasy at work, I'll give him a free pass on idealization and passive aggression (since I took splitting and I'm already a little stretched); actual projection, and this is not a joke, we can see the jealousy and injustice collecting common to any martyr complex and/or motivated troll; I'll give him another pass on projective identification and somatization because I don't care to play doctor that seriously with him; OK, I guess that's it, actually. The neurotic defenses are missing, as far as I can tell, and the mature defenses are also completely absent.

Seriously, take a look at the Cliff's Notes. This guy needs to see a shrink before he offs somebody. This is just stupid. And all over a fuckin' internet poll, for crying out loud.

What the fuck?!

In other news, neocons apparently think that theories of truth are a big fuckin' secret. (Also via PZ.) Seriously, these people need to take into account that Wikipedia exists (how about libraries?), or... or... or I don't know what. Fuck, who am I kidding, the shit either works or it doesn't. It all depends on whether the masses are idiots or educated enough to see through the bullshit. Whoops, I think my cynicism is showing!

Quickies Before Bed

Arguing with a cyberspace publisher is probably easier than arguing with a meatspace publisher. Still, it's frustrating to hear that my cover image needs at least 0.125" bleed on all sides after forgetting it from the first time; then to remember, "OK, I'll just add 0.25" to each dimension in Photoshop," but forget that it's 0.25" total and instead add 0.5" total; then to be told that I still don't have at least 0.125" bleed on all sides. Last I checked, 0.25 is at least 0.125.

Keep in mind that I'm doing all this fancible graphics work on a Mac I bought when I graduated high school in 2002. Yeah, the RAM upgrade I got with it put it at a total of half a gig. It takes me several minutes to open Photoshop, I have to watch a progress bar creep along every time I save, and making the .psd into a .pdf gives me nearly enough time to write another book.

Then again, I'm glad that it still just works. But still. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I've been looking at on the internet, which I think you should look at, too:

• Via Rhodopsin, here is the most useful Amazon product review I've seen in a while.
• That reminds me of this shirt, sent to me by Silver Garou (but, like, months ago). Look, if you haven't seen this before, you need to read the reviews. It's almost as good as this.
• Via Pharyngula, The Counter-Creationism Handbook now has its own iPhone app! Awesome!
• Via my crazy browsing habits, I somehow started by looking at Rise Against music videos, and ended at the most effective commercial in the world. I hate myself for liking this, you have to believe me.
• Rhodopsin also just now sent me an interesting article where a dude takes an idea and some numbers and mashes them up with another idea and other numbers, and while I'm no longer really qualified to check his work (Hell, I can't even check calculus limericks any more!), it is at least an interesting coincidence.
• I've also started reading Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and I wish I'd read it back in 2007. Then I wouldn't be tempted to say that he stole my idea and went back in time to do actual research on it. (This happens more often than I'd like to admit. See also: James Downard's An Ill Wind in Tortuca, brought to me via Silver Garou.)

OK, that's enough out of me. I need sleep. And to get this damned book finished!

Bullshit Pulpit: The Doctrine and Dogma of Double-Deism

I'm getting real sick of religious people getting their trump card of "God says so" in public discussion, so I am inventing a new religion to trump their trump. A "double-trump," if you will, hence the name: "Double-Deism." Today's post will detail the tenets of Double-Deism and how precisely these counter the tactics of whatever religiot you're arguing with at the moment. First and foremost is to remember to improvise, and turn the believer's own tactics against him or her. Counter any dismissal with accusations that your opponent is being intolerant and disrespectful of your carefully considered and deeply held religious convictions; brook no disagreement on the legitimacy of your theology by asserting that any statements discrediting Double-Deism (including this post's admission that it's a joke religion) are damnable heresy; and remember that your religion is ultimately whatever you say it is, no matter what.

Double-Deism is the belief in the generic anthropomorphic creator deity known as "Double-God." Double-God is simple enough to understand: whatever positive qualities are ascribed to your opponent's deity, Double-God is twice as awesome. Period. If someone tries to tell you that their god is infinite, and that Double-God can't be doubly infinite, prove your superiority with math. Proofs abound (it's amazing the bullshit that people will buy if you just say it right), but perhaps the simplest and easiest one would be to start by having your opponent consider the set of all even integers, the set of all odd integers, and the set of all integers. While each set is infinite in size, the set of all integers is equal to the other two sets combined, and so it is doubly infinite (or at least its infinitude is double that of the other two). Similarly, while your opponent's deity of choice may also be infinite, Double-God is simply twice as infinite.

It's important to keep in mind at this point that, while you understand Double-God perfectly (because Double-Deism means whatever you want it to mean), you cannot expect the infidels to understand. Double-God has not revealed itself to them, and so they will be unable to embrace it. This means that you must always be very, very nice to the unbelievers: tell them in as sickeningly sweet of a tone as you can manage that it's OK, you don't expect them to understand the depth and sophistication of your faith as Double-God has revealed it to you. Really, it's no problem, they don't have to understand or believe you, they just have to take you seriously like they ask you to take them seriously. That's all there is to it.

The Alert Reader will have noticed that I referred to Double-God as an "it," and this brings us to the mystery of double-doubleness. You see, while many anthropomorphic deities are male or female, Double-God is twice as male as the male gods and at the same time twice as female as the female gods. But this is still only double (and doubly so), it is not quadruple. There's no such thing as "Quadruple-God," after all - that would just be silly. This also makes Double-Deism the first truly egalitarian religion ever, since the mascot, I mean, frontman, that is, central authority figure is both male and female (and doubly so) at all times and in all respects. This is not a contradiction because maleness and femaleness are not mutually exclusive, Double-God just makes the infidels think they are.

Double-Deism also has a central holy text known as the Super-Bible. Unlike other holy texts, which are written on physical pages in Earthly languages, the Super-Bible is a book of pure meaning that cannot be so contained. This is what makes the Super-Bible so much more glorious and awesome than any Earthly text. It also means that you can't just pick it up and read it cover-to-cover; so glorious a book is not meant to be sullied by mortal hands for mortal purposes. Instead, Double-God delivers divine revelations to true believers on an as-needed basis, using whatever book is handy at the moment. Infidels will see nothing but a mundane book, but true believers will see the Super-Bible as Double-God wants them to see it at the moment. Double-God can also show different believers different parts of the text at one and the same time, and nobody can prove that this is not what's happening, so everyone has to go along with it no matter what.

It's also important to remember that anything said to be from the Super-Bible that works against the point you're trying to make at the moment is despicable lies from an infidel who was making things up to discredit true believers such as yourself. And if you ever contradict yourself, you have the option of either A) denouncing your past assertions as the muddled ravings of your past infidel self before you saw the light (if this was a long time ago), or B) asserting that there is no real contradiction, only a failure to understand in the mind of your opponent (if this was not a long time ago). The Super-Bible is a perfect and true holy text, after all, and therefore cannot contradict itself. All you have to do is work backwards from there!

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the truth of Double-Deism is its eschatology. The miracle here lies in the fact that every doomsday prophecy is true. You see, every time someone said that the world was going to end, it actually would have, but for the fact that Double-God stepped in and saved the entire Universe. Double-God has to do this a lot, which is why it never has any time to perform stupid miracles or give private conversations to unbelievers. I mean, subverting the apocalyptic machinations of every other supernatural critter in the human imagination Universe is a rather taxing ordeal, because many of these entities are themselves infinite and omnipotent deities, and not even Double-God's doubly-doubled infinitude is enough to keep up with all of that noise and also tally the fall of every sparrow and attend to next Tuesday's football game. You take care of that shit yourself, and get some fucking perspective while you're at it, you fuckin' ingrate.

So yeah, this should be enough to get you started on being a full-fledged proselytizer for Double-Deism. Remember to stay flexible and improvise, and never give any ground to your opponents which you won't use against them later. For those of you who have never been infected with a religion before, it can be difficult to put yourself into the religiot mindset; just remember to start with "you're right," apply pareidolia and confirmation bias liberally, and "Double-God made a miracle happen" is a legal move. Also, you have to stay serious and nice the entire time, to drive home the point that you are sincere in your beliefs no matter how crazy they appear to be. Religious people do this all the time, after all, and we need to beat them at their own stupid game here. Keep those things in mind, and you'll be all set to flummox your opponents in public debate for years to come!

Examples for Practice:

Religiot: You can't have morality without religion!

You: Yes we can, because Double-God says we can.

R: You only believe that because you're deluded by faith.

U: That's not true, and we could still have morality without religion even if Double-God didn't give us permission. Double-God just confirmed this, I read it in the Super-Bible just now. Here, it says, "Humans can make a perfectly legitimate morality without religion, whether or not any deities exist. Double-deists understand this, independent of their faith. This would also be true even if Double-God didn't exist, which it does. The word of the Twice-Monarch, thanks be to Double-God."

R: [Deity du jour] created the Universe and everything in it.

U: Sure, but Double-God created that deity. They had a falling out, though, and now your deity just doesn't want to talk about it.

R: Life has no meaning or purpose unless those things are given to us by [deity du jour].

U: Sure it does! Double-God says so, right here in the Super-Bible! [Elaborate as in first example.]

Poison for Your Brain: Side hugs. I am not making this up.

You need to watch this video. You also need to record your reaction to it on a video of your own and upload that to YouTube, because I am a schadenfreude junkie and I want to see your brain break. OK, that won't happen, but you still need to watch this video:

I don't think I can stress enough that this is not a joke. In a world where we are fighting over women's rights to reproduce or not, where relatively harmless cannabinoids are outlawed while addictive carcinogens are perfectly legal*, where you have to play primitive and silly social games to get laid because you can't just go out and pay someone to fuck you however you like, where legal contracts for domestic partnerships are only legal in certain places if the parties' plumbing matches in a certain way, where the same label of "militancy" is used to describe tactics of public debate and tactics of delusion-based violence alike - in such a world, there are people who are worried about the propriety of hugs. "Full-frontal hugs," that is. Side hugs, apparently, are OK. So is being a rough rider, I guess.

I feel the need to point out that I am not making this up. My friend Jack, who told me about this last night, said that he had to look up over a dozen internet articles before he was convinced that this is not a Poe. I only needed three, but then again, I've been to an Acquire the Fire concert. I've seen this shit in action firsthand.

These lunatics (and I mean that literally, these people are actually crazy in an important way) really believe that the mere chance of your groin coming into contact with the groin of another person, in a way that might possibly somehow be stimulating (if you've never actually had sex, that is), merits the overhauling of a nearly universal display of familiar affection. Double-you tee fuck. The killer, for me, is that even if you do their whole side-hug bullshit like you're posing for a photo, you still have to watch your hands, or you might inadvertently brush up against a nipple!

In a way, though, I find this almost poetic. Here is yet another religious warping of a perfectly natural part of being human, engineered to protect against imaginary harm in an impotent display of piety, to separate them from the unwashed masses in their minds while not actually accomplishing anything of substance at all. Really, it's religion in a nutshell.

* - For clarity, I think they should all be legal and the answer to abuse and addiction, like so many things, is therapy and education.

Dear The Internet: Today I made another blasphemy!

OK, so I'm all about doing those things I say I'll do. Really, I am, I'm just a procrastinator, too. At any rate:

You can click that for huge. And, y'know, complete. So far. Look, this is like a progress report because I wanted to put something up, I'm just sick of Photoshop right now.

Anyway, in all my dawdling, I came up with a far grander vision for what I wanted this to be (with a little prodding help from Silver Garou and Rhodopsin), and I've scaled it back to something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. Two weeks isn't already past unreasonable, is it? I think I can safely tell you that a pile of puppies is involved. Stay tuned!

So that only took, like, a month...

I swear, I can do decent work when I sit down and take my time. And get some feedback (thanks, Silver Garou & Rhodopsin!). Here it is:

Click for huge!

It's a wraparound, that's just the front. The click-through is bigger and has the whole actual thing. I'm giving myself the rest of the weekend to stare at this and see if anything is egregiously wrong with it, so if there's any feedback, the proof isn't shipping until Monday.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-eight: Emily Rosa

Today's interesting thing is also a person! Before I get to Emily, though, I want to talk about some really stupid bullshit. It's called Therapeutic Touch, or "TT" if you feel like making cutesy ga-ga noises. Good thing I do!

TT was invented from whole cloth by Dolores Krieger (a PhD & RN who really ought to know better) and Dora Kunz (a theosophist who apparently wouldn't know a gullibility zombie if it bit her on the face). Pro Tip: one did. My favorite part about Therapeutic "Touch" is that it's a misnomer. It's also known as "Non-Contact Therapeutic Touch," which sounds exactly as stupid as it is. That's right, kids: Therapeutic Touch does not involve any actual touching.

Because that would be icky.

Anyhow, TT is more or less the alternative (read: ineffective) medicine equivalent of prayer. You cook up a story about "energy support systems" (or "invisible sky genies," as the case may be), then you think really hard that you're engaging in some kind of action at a distance with any degree of causal efficacy. Then you wait and see: either something good happens because of whatever else was going on at the time, or nothing good happens and you blame something else. You don't even ape science by going through science-like motions (ahem, homeopaths), or use nifty rocks (crystal fuckers), or anything of the kind.

It's so stupid, even a nine-year-old could debunk it - and that's where Emily Rosa comes in!

When Emily was in the fourth grade, she decided that she wanted to see if TT was the shit, or just shit, so she decided to put it to the test at her school science fair. She got 21 bullshit-spouting blatherskites (or, as Wikipedia puts it, "TT practitioners") to participate in her experiment, which was very simply set up: picture a table with your standard science fair three-part display board, and there are two holes for hands in the bottom of the board; put an idiot on one side, and a fourth grader on the other, and have the idiot stick his or her hands through the holes. Then the fourth grader flips a coin to decide which of the idiot's hands she'll place her own hand over, and the idiot is supposed to tell the fourth grader where her hand is.

TT practitioners have described the energy field they claim to feel as having the consistency of gelatin or taffy; they say they can really feel it. Rosa's study put the lie to that, with the average idiot scoring a 4.1 out of 10 trials (chance would put them at 5). Emily's science fair project was so straightforwardly awesome (as opposed to backwards and crookedly awful) that it got published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, placing Emily in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest person to have a research study published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Some incorrigible whiners have said, more or less, "Hey, no fair! She's just a fourth grader, she can't do real science!" Of course, the great thing about science is that whining accomplishes nothing; if you think you can do better than a fourth grader, all you have to do (and the only thing you can do) is actually do better than a fourth grader. You may have to perform at that level a few times for the sake of a little something called "statistical significance," but that's really all there is to it!

...or can't they?