40 Backpacking Hacks, now x3

Which makes 120.  The good people at The First 40 Miles podcast (earlier blogged about here) have a new third volume of their short tips out.  On each week's episode, the couple who publishes the podcast present yet another hack; when they have 40 (a repeating theme here) stacked up, they bundle them into a book.  None of these will greatly change your life, or even upgrade it like say a new backpack might, but a lot of these little tricks can make your time on the trail more fun and most of them cost in the cheap-to-free range.  Here, go read their blurbs at TF40M then click through and do some book shopping.

"Annihilation" Revisited

If Monday's review of the movie Annihilation still has you a little weirded out, consider this possibility: there's pretty fair indication that something like this already happened, as discussed here at the blog nearly five years ago.   [after note: The second author's real-life lab is located within the fictional bounds of Area X, about 12 miles west-south-west of the lighthouse.  Draw whatever conclusions you wish here!]

Not saying that it did happen, mind you.  Though it would simplify the explanation for that genetic complexity curve's sudden appearance at 10^5 base pairs.

Nice garnish.  Now if we could get them to grow sweet potato hooves, it'd make a complete meal.

More on WWV, Frequency Alignment, and Yaesu Radio Data Modes

Last month I posted a tip on how to exorcise the built-in – and incomprehensibly documented – data mode offsets in some of the newer Yaesu radios.  This past week I've spent some time helping a friend sort out the same problem on his FT-991A.  A couple of hours into this process, we likely still have at least an hour more to go.

Now I see that other people are having the same problems, and documenting their solutions on the web.  Generally this involves using WWV's signal as a set of reference frequencies while plowing through menus and manuals, zeroing out unwanted pre-set offsets one by one, and muttering small curses all the while.

If you've got the patience to fix these factory-standard defects, now is a good time to pick up otherwise fine radios at fire sale prices.

It's Island Week at Atlas Obscura

Like the title said, it's Island Week over at Atlas Obscura.  Every day, something new about one or more islands: how it got there, what it's doing geographically, the people who live there, etc.  It's worth a few minutes' going over.

My favorite islands probably won't get any mention, for which I am grateful.

Movie Review: Annihilation – What was the question? Were you saying something? Huh.

Some stories encourage us to ask questions, but give no answers of their own.  Take Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  While reading it was clear that the book is all about asking questions and not about giving one-size-fits-all answers.  The author even says so in some of his subsequent essays.  (Try to read answers that aren't there into that book and you just get mid-60's hippie communes passing around glasses of LSD-tinged water.  Yuck.)  Then some stories are all about asking the correct question.  For example, the film adaptation of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life into Arrival is one.  While a bunch of .gov people are rushing around making things worse by demanding answers right-damn-now to the question "Are the aliens a military threat?" (to which the clear answer is "almost certainly not" – they're overwhelming and have the jump on us, yet are out in the open and trying to communicate) the main character in the story is asking "How do we talk with them?"  In the meantime, the overall story line asks "What are the ramifications of understanding alien ways of thinking?"  Good mind-expanding stuff.

Taking this one step farther, Jeff Vandemeer's book Annihilation seems to ask "What is this 'question' construct of which you speak?"  The... whatever the hell it is... is clearly more than just a mindless interstellar biological infection, but even the concept of 'question' doesn't really apply here.  Things just are.  And they are overwhelming.  By the end we see that all attempts to shape things into neat little human Q-and-A understanding have been defeated, and yet somehow human existence continues to exist.  The amazing thing is that the book trilogy pulls this off without devolving into formless obscurist crap.

The movie adaptation of Annihilation, while a heavy-handed attempt at a commercially viable film, keeps this central theme of the book alive.  For that reason alone we should thank the studio by buying a ticket and watching.  Because film is a visual medium, this skews the movie more toward the horror side in showing the changes the alien whatever is making.  That's understandable, though sometime hard to take.  But in the end, the basic story is preserved, and that is an increasingly rare thing.

Now for the down sides.  It really doesn't look anything like the St. Marks area.  For me that's a small disappointment, but I don't think many other people care.  The more serious problem is that some (though not all) of the adaptation is needlessly heavy, chopping out most of the biologist's motivating background here, randomly adding in an affair sub-plot there, etc.  It's another case of a screenwriter run amok: "I am the great screenwriter.  This is nothing but a well-regarded book, which I will now largely discard and replace with my own hack writing.  Now where did I put my crayons?"  This keeps happening, and the resulting movies that are marginally successful keep getting made.  Occasionally screenwriters are held in check, and in those cases we see great and financially successful movies like Lord of the Rings.  This movie skirts with that tar pit, mostly avoiding it but still taking a few sticky missteps.  At least the main themes of the original story were preserved.

So, bottom line?  Call it 3-minus out of 4 stars, for a B- effort.  Go see it if you want a quick sample of the New Weird without all the hassle of plowing through what can be fairly slow and content-thin reading.

No, I Really Don't Understand This Either

Though I kind of get the "walking past the Earth's poles" analogy.  Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson discuss the time before time over at Popular Science.
1crystal - Create, Discover and Share GIFs on Gfycat
Well, at least the illustration is pretty cool.  Don't stare at it too long though.  You might fall in, and then who knows where you'd come back out.

About those Secret Family Recipes

As it turns out, a lot of them come from advertising copy and package labels.  Article over at Atlas Obscura. 

Of course, our secret family recipes can't come from these kinds of sources, because these written recipes give definite, repeatable measurements.  Most of our family recipes come with quantity descriptions that are some variant on the phrase "Oh you know, enough."  This has lead to a lot of reverse engineering these past eight years, let me tell you.