Flash Pulp – Page 203 – Classic Pulp Tales for a Modern World

Of Figs and Vengeance

Most interesting article I’ve read today:

Trees retaliate when their fig wasps don’t service them

Figs and fig wasps have evolved to help each other out: Fig wasps lay their eggs inside the fruit where the wasp larvae can safely develop, and in return, the wasps pollinate the figs.

But what happens when a wasp lays its eggs but fails to pollinate the fig?

The trees get even by dropping those figs to the ground, killing the baby wasps inside, reports a Cornell University and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. – More at PhysOrg.com

ill humoured

I find “Year’s Funniest Commercials” shows pretty disturbing.

If broadcast TV wasn’t doomed we might have ended up accepting commercial creation as some sort of art form – I rather suspect we’ll still end up with some jerk at the MoMA presenting an exhibit of ancient commercials. (If it hasn’t already happened.)

I envision a huddled group of middle-aged future people, beer\wine in hand, maybe wearing a t-shirt with the Geico gecko on it, watching their 3rd generation low-res recordings of the “The King” B.K. commercials and reminiscing about their childhood.

Dream Time

I go through odd cycles of dream repetition: years after I’d moved I used to regularly dream that the town I grew up in was being leveled by a nuclear explosion. It would always start at a distance and then roll towards me from the horizon, with a crushing sense of inevitability.

More recently many of my dreams have forced me into having to board a futuristic plane.

(Sometimes it’s just for inter-city travel, sometimes it’s a shuttle that does local-system planet hopping, but it’s always the same craft.)

The machine is full of cream coloured plastic – the interior is likely my brain mashing together the planes and trains I’ve been in. Orange cloth shades cover the windows, which seem to be made of exceedingly thick plastic. The seats are blue with coloured flecks randomly distributed.

The plane body is similar to NASA’s shuttles, but its made of a gray metal, like a DC-3, and the wings, although swept back like the shuttle, are twice the size.

The plane takes flight from a long chromed-steel platform, with regularly spaced ribs that shorten as the strip continues.

The launch faces onto a huge bay, and every time we take flight we’re slammed with acceleration Gs – just before the left wing rips off, at which point we inevitably corkscrew into the water at an immense speed.

January 25, 2010
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dreamembrance, personal info, Uncategorised

Local Culture

My lovely wife Jessica has posted some new music to the interweb.

You should check it out.

Squeeze Machine

An oldish video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g]

Also:

The author initially conceived of the idea for the squeeze machine from her observations in animal science. Cattle being held in a squeeze chute, while waiting in line for veterinary attention, often appeared somewhat agitated during the waiting; some of the animals, however, seemed to relax once pressure was applied to large areas of their bodies… In working with children, we have found that 5 minutes of sustained use of the squeeze machine is the minimum typically required to obtain a readily detectable calming effect.

– Calming Effects of Deep Touch Pressure in Patients with Autistic Disorder, College Students, and Animals

Is ours a future full of relaxed autistic people encased in squeezy robotic exoskeletons?

Great Sunflower

The Great Sunflower Project is a pretty simple idea. They’ll send you some sunflower seeds if you’ll spend fifteen minutes, twice a month, watching your blooms and recording how many bees come and go.

They crunch the numbers at their site and you get some nifty flowers – sounds fair to me, and anything that helps stop colony collapse disorder seems like a good idea.

Between The Great Sunflower Project and that recent DARPA balloon spotting competition it sounds like distributed data collection is really starting to catch on, which has me thinking: there have to be some heuristics that can be applied to already existing webcams (traffic cams, monument cams, etc) to determine if that area is suffering a disaster – sort of an early warning zombie detection system.

Still awaiting the sequel, The Nakedest Prey

Speaking of coveting: Have you ever seen that movie, The Naked Prey?

It’s the one where a bunch of “Savage Africans” kill some Caucasian folks who refuse to pay them tribute, then chase the last one around the savannas while the audience shifts uncomfortably in their seats from all the racism.

There’s a school of thought these days that the film is brilliant despite the racial discomfort. There’s very little dialogue, most of the movie is just an underdeveloped white guy running through the grass in tiny underpants, and yet it remains pretty compelling.

Weirdly, the plot is supposedly based on a true story, “John Colter’s Escape”, which tells of John Colter and his partner crossing some Blackfoot Indians and having to run away. Not quite Africa, and shooting a fellow in front of his friends isn’t quite the same thing as refusing to give a gift, but still very “The Most Dangerous Game”.

To bring it back to my coveting: the thing that’s really always stuck with me about the movie is the design of the weird person-poker they gave the tribesmen. It’s tough to find a clear picture, but it looks like they got a discount on used swords from an old BBC production, then replaced all of the hilts with two foot poles to make them pass as ‘spears’.

I’ve always found this weird mutant weapon to be awesome – it’s exactly the kind of thing I want my Japanese-RPG character to be carrying, or to have hanging on my office wall in case of zombie attack.