My Pet Rats (w/ Illustrations)

I've often told my friends and family that I own the most cowardly pet rats in the world. I still firmly believe this is the case. It's not that they're stupid - they're not the brightest rats I've ever owned, but I've seen them figure enough stuff out that I know they're not dumb by rat standards. No, it's purely a matter of cowardice.

Most pet rats bond with their owner rather quickly - but with Othello and Iago, it was like pulling teeth... A tremendously slow spiral of increasing trust. It was literally months before they learned that it's safe to approach me during play time, even if I'm busy doing something else.

But even beyond their interactions with me, they still get frightened of just about anything. Particularly strange noises - "strange" being defined very loosely. At one point, Othello completely freaked out at the crinkly sound a plastic bag was making while he was in the midst of walking over it.

An object that's out of place - or that they're not used to seeing - is enough to make them wary. This goes for objects that I happen to be holding, in fact, and they're still getting used to the idea that even when I'm doing unfathomable things I'm safe for them to be around.

And yet, despite this fear of strange objects and situations, once we started to make friends one of the first things they decided it was safe to explore was the interior of my mouth.

 

When they started doing this, they were still at the point where any unexpected movement on my part was considered a potential threat.  Moving my hands too quickly?  Oh, no!  But apparently sticking their heads in my mouth was a-ok.

I'm still trying to figure out how any animal, domesticated or not, could develop that as a survival instinct.

Despite their mutual cowardice, Othello and Iago are almost as different from one another as their Shakespearean namesakes.  Othello is the explorer - the better climber and jumper, and always the first to overcome his fear (however briefly) to look around something new.  Iago, on the other hand, is more curious about people.  They terrify him, make no mistake, but he can't help but spend a lot of his time trying to figure out what these big pink-fleshed ape-things are going to do next.

Another example of the contrast in their personalities is the way they handle treats.  Othello is a pretty typical rat in this regard - show him some food, and he'll cautiously approach it in an effort to establish its status as food...  And then he'll quickly snatch it away and run off to devour it in peace, lest someone catch on to his diabolical scheme of taking the food he was offered.

Like I said, that's pretty typical for rats.  But Iago's very different - in fact, he's fairly unique in my experience in this respect.  He's quite slow and careful in taking food from me, as if he were trying to make absolutely sure that yes, it really is okay for him to take what I'm offering.

Sometimes he'll sit there looking at me upwards of a full minute, the food in his mouth, reluctant to actually start eating...  Maybe he's afraid he's going to offend me or something if he chows down.  Or maybe he's worried that the whole thing is a bureaucratic mistake and he wants to give me a chance to correct it before he passes the point of no return.

I dunno.  But I find it kind of weird.

That Was Interesting, But...

I've got no art to show off this week, nor has anyone else's work grabbed my attention... So, instead, I'll use this opportunity to announce my abandoning my blog's schedule.

I started it as an experiment - and I think it's run its course. Continuing it is starting to be a pain, and I've learned just about everything I was going to by this point, namely:

-People seem to like my political posts a lot more than anything else.
-Nerdy stuff comes in second.
-Everything else I blog about tends to generate very few hits.

I'll continue to try to keep a M-F schedule, but from now on I'll just blog about whatever grabs my interest.

Spacetime Invisibility

Yesterday, I was linked to by Warren Kinsella's blog. That lead to an extra 250 or so visitors than I normally get each day. I don't expect many (or, really, any) repeat visits - but it was still pretty cool. Even if I did call Mr. Kinsella a hack. (For the record, I meant it in the nicest possible way, just to highlight how big a deal it is that he's speaking out against Iggy's policy on Afghanistan.

If any of you did come back after yesterday - welcome! I really wasn't expecting that, but it's neat having you back.

Anyway, for today's topic... I thought this was pretty cool, so I figured I'd share: Theoretical Spacetime Invisibility Cloaks.

The basic idea is surprisingly simple. We see things because our eyes are able to interpret information from visible light. That light travels at, obviously enough, the speed of light, which means we see things once light has traveled from them to our eyes. Technically speaking, we never see anything the exact instant happens - there's always a time lag between the object and when we see it.

This is fairly well-known for anyone with an interest in astronomy. The Moon is one light-second away, the Sun a little over eight light-minutes away, the nearest star 4.3 light-years away, the nearest galaxy , and so on. There are time lags on even everyday distances, however impossibly slight. For something a meter away, we see it as it was about 1/300,000,000th of a second ago.

Here's how you use that information to build a spacetime cloak. All those times are for the speed of light in a vacuum, but light can slow down depending on what material it passes through. Researchers have slowed down light to as little as 38 miles per hour by sending it through a special, super-dense form of matter. And it's through carefully slowing down and speeding up light that we can create a temporal void.

Let's say you're standing a mile away from an observer. You start slowly decreasing the speed of the light traveling towards the observer so that it's only traveling at 60 miles per hour, or a mile per minute. Since you're slowing the light down gradually, the observer won't be able to perceive the change. Once the light has reached 60 miles per hour, the observer is now seeing you as you were one minute ago. You've now created a one minute spacetime corridor. You've now got a minute to do whatever you want without the observer having any idea what you're up to.

The Afghanistan Mission and the Liberal Party

 It's been quite a week for the Liberal Party.  It's also been quite a week for anyone who, like me, grows increasingly sick of Ignatief's weak, half-arsed "third way" leadership.

Now, like most Canadians I've never been particularly fond of Dion as the party leader, but Iggy's making me look back at Dion's brief days with nostalgia.  Thanks to Ignatief, the Liberals have come to be some of the Conservative Party's staunchest allies.

Oh, I know it doesn't look that way on paper.  At least, not with a cursory glance.  Pay attention, though, and you'll notice a pattern of Liberals being conspicuously absent from strategic votes - witness the way the vote for Bill C-300 went down (and that was their own bloody bill!) - making their efforts to battle Conservative policies highly disingenuous.  They're letting the CPC basically get their way with everything, from privatizing Crown corporations, to weakening environmental laws (even those related to offshore drilling, of all things), to killing important progressive legislation, and now their efforts even include extending the Afghanistan mission by a good three years.

Last week, I blogged about this last issue briefly, but I feel the need to return to the topic for a variety of reasons - one of which is the fact that even Warren Kinsella has come out against the Liberal handling of the Afghanistan issue:

You know, I was busy with last night’s gig (and a big shout out to my buddy BCL, who came by to take in the show) and feeling sorry for myself for my Man Cold©, so I didn’t get a chance to fully reflect on the following:
1.  The Prime Minister said last Fall that our combat mission in Afghanistan would end, and would be “a civilian humanitarian development mission after 2011.”
2.  The Liberal Party’s leader said this Spring that his party also favoured “a different role focusing on a humanitarian commitment” after 2011.
3. “Humanitarian.” They both used that word.
4.  After the Liberal leader abruptly changed his mind about all this “humanitarian” stuff, so did the Prime Minister.  Both of them now favour extending the war, and yet more combat roles for at least 1,000 troops.
5.  There’ll be no debate about any of this in Parliament, which is, you know, the Supreme Legislature of the People.  No one seems to give a shit about that.
6.  To drive in the final nail in democracy’s proverbial coffin, the Prime Minister emasculates his Minister of Defence, and sends out his press secretary to tell the rest of us that we’ll be at war for a few more years.  On political info-tainment shows.
7.  Got all that?  Whiplash-inducing reversals on all sides, open contempt for the legislature, cabinet ministers neutered in public, unelected hacks wielding the power of the executive.  Oh, and, more war.
8. More war.  Just like that, in the week where we are all supposed to be remembering why war is a bad thing.
9.  And political people actually wonder why both the Liberals and the Conservatives are dropping below 30 per cent in the polls, and why the NDP is moving up.  And they wonder why people are growing more and more cynical about democracy, and democratic institutions, and are angrily lashing out at politicians.
10.  Wonder no more.

For context, this is the same Warren Kinsella who's long been a Liberal party hack and even a high-ranking campaign coordinator.  Him coming out so strongly against a party's stated position is very rare.  So rare that I don't think it's ever actually happened before.

So, why would the Liberals stake out such a terrible position?

Basically, because Iggy, much like his "third way" liberalism, is stupid.  I strongly suspect Iggy was trying to stake out a position that would attract Red Tories of the CPC (the old guard who are supposedly non-crazy) away from Harper's neoconservativism and toward the Liberals.  Basically, they wanted to out-conservative - or at least pre-empt - Harper.  "Extend the mission with 400 troops?" they asked, scoffing, "Why, stop being such a girly man, Prime Minister!  You should have a full thousand!"

The problem with this plan is that it can't possibly work.  Harper's the one who made the announcement of the extension - trying to impress the less-than-30% of voters who actually like the idea by throwing a larger number out isn't good enough to attract them away from the CPC, because pro-War has long been the CPC's territory.  Harper basically has two choices at this point - he can say, "Nah, 400 will manage," at which point the pro-War crowd will continue licking Harper's feet and praising him for his wisdom, or else he can say "Sure, a thousand's even better," at which point he'll have conquered the idea as his own and the Liberals don't get any credit for it.  (Turns out, Harper actually said both, in the order I listed above.) 

 But by even making the suggestion in the first place, the Liberals can't speak out against the idea of the extension without coming across as a bunch of waffling wimps.

Which, of course, they are.

Which is why, of course, this is exactly what they did

“How many trainers? Where are they going to be? Are they going to be out of combat? How much is it going to cost? Why is it impossible for this government to give simple answers to clear questions that Canadians need to have answers to before they can approve any mission by this government,” Michael Ignatieff demanded.

These are meaningless and weak questions, and Ignatieff doesn't actually expect any answers - at this point it's just flailing.  Even NPD turncoat and third-way liberalism champion Rae admits that the Liberals can't do anything to really fight the CPC on this issue:

But, for now, they are hostages to Conservative policy, as Mr. Rae admitted. "We have done an unusual job for an official opposition and we are not -we are not in a position to negotiate a plan, we are not in a position to do anything...," he said after Question Period.

I've seen it speculated that the real issue here is the Liberal war chest.  Namely, that it's empty - if they were to go to election too soon, the party would implode from lack of funding.  So, they move politically rightward at every chance, hoping to eat away at CPC support, while biding for time to refill the war chests.  This hasn't been working, of course, because war chests get filled through strong leadership and brave ideological stances - something good leaders like Layton and Harper* have understood for some time.

Honestly, the state of the Liberal party, the poor leadership Iggy's giving them...  It really makes me miss Cretien.  Pepper-spray and all.

*Here I use the term "good" to mean "effective," not "kind" or "righteous" or the like.  Which should be obvious, since Harper's one of the few politicians in North America I'd unironically describe as evil.

Shower Products for Men

"It's the closest your face will ever come to being shaved BY A SPACESHIP!"

The Making of Tron

Anyone who knows me knows how excited I am about the upcoming Tron sequel.  The original hasn't particularly aged well, but as a kid I absolutely adored it - not just for the special effects, but also for the glimpses of the society inside the computer that the movie depicted.

Years ago I was lucky enough to see the Making of Tron feature in the anniversary edition DVD of the original movie.  For those who aren't so lucky, though, the entire feature is available on Youtube.  Watching it really drives home just how huge an undertaking the movie was at the time, and how far special effects technology has come in only thirty years.

Here's the first part (of 9).  The rest can be found going to Youtube directly.

Ghost Town completed

I finally finished Ghost Town, and you can find it here.  It's not quite what I was going for, but it's fairly close and honestly I was losing patience.  I doubt the rest of my buildings and neighbourhoods will have quite that level of detail.

To cleanse my palette, I also did a character design of Boss Lyubochka.

I think I'll try to tackle a bar interior next.