“Almost Human,” Race, Gender, Difference, and my 6-year-old Son

So, this morning I made the moderately irresponsible decision to watch this trailer for Almost Human while my 6yo and I sat eating breakfast:

Mojo’s description, and my interest in how sci-fi can help us explore racial tension, had me hopeful, but I ended up being sort of underwhelmed. It was awful gun-shooty, and I kinda have a policy about Violence, and it’s wonderful capacity to Solve All Our Problems.
Anyway, attracted by the gun shots and action, my boy leaned in to watch. When the trailer was over he went back to eating and reading, not saying anything. After a few beats it dawned on me that I really ought to ask what he thought of it; the trailer is pretty gun violent (which is a thing I’m not cool with), and the boy would know enough to know I felt that way. I doubted his silence signified a lack of opinion. So I asked him if he liked the trailer. He said yes. I asked why, and he said it was “interesting” (which, in and of itself, was interestingly noncommittal–you can always back-pedal from “interesting,” by insisting that you aren’t *endorsing,* just showing interest. I’m interested in the Holocaust–I’m downright *fascinated* by the Holocaust–but no one thinks I approve).
I asked what he found interesting. He said he didn’t know.
So we watched it again. “Is it the music?” I asked, “Do you like the music?” He said no, so we cut the sound. It was still interesting. In fact, it is the most interesting way to watch this trailer, it’s downright fascinating, because *every* thing you need to know about this show you can get just from the acting, the cutting, the framing, and the images themselves.

“So, what interests you about the pictures. Is it the action, the shooting?”
Yeah, that’s sort of interesting.
“What about the man. Is the man interesting?”
Yes.
“Why?”
Because he’s a boy and I’m a boy.
“So the show wouldn’t be as interesting if it was about a girl who was injured and then had trouble adjusting?” (aside: That show would *fascinate* me.)
No.
“Is the show interesting because he’s a police officer?”
He’s not a police officer. He’s a detective.
*smiles* “Yes, you’re right. That’s different, but daddy thinks of a detective as a kind of cop. But it’s different. Would the show be interesting if the man was a cook or worked in an office? Would you like that show?”
No.
“Would it be interesting if the man had a quieter cop job, if there was no shooting?”
No.
“What about his partner, the robot with the dark skin. Is he interesting?”
Yes.
“Would the show be as interesting if the robot was a girl?”
No.
“Would you be as interested in the show if the man had dark skin and the robot was white?” (aside: my boy is a pink colored human)
Yes.
“What if they were both white, or both dark?”
No.
“Why?”
It’s interesting because they’re different.
“What’s the man like? The white man?”
He’s . . . bad? Or mean.
“I think he’s angry, he’s upset that he was hurt and his life changed. It can be very hard to adjust, and he’s having trouble adjusting. What about the black man, the robot. What’s he like.”
He’s . . . nice? Or calm?
“Is he happy?”
No.
“Why not?”
I don’t know.
“He think that he’s unhappy because he doesn’t get treated fairly, because he’s a robot, and that’s different. Is *that* interesting?”
. . .
“Would the show be as interesting if they were reversed, if the white man was nice and the dark robot was angry?”
. . . maybe?
“What if they were both the same? If they were both nice or mean?”
It would be better if they were both nice. . . .
“Why?”
. . .
“Does the white man scare you, bud?”
Yeah.
“That’s OK; sometimes people are scary when they’re angry. But this show is still interesting, even though one of the men scares you?”
Yeah.
“Why’s the show interesting?”
Because they are different.

Anyway, so, that’s where we left off, with this weird little outline of how different is *too* different, and how little is not different enough. No huge revelation or realization here, but I needed a place to lay this all out because I’d tweeted about this conversation, and folks wanted details.


If there’s any takeaway here, it’s this: I remember seeing White Man’s Burden when I was a teen. It’s a clumsy, laughably earnest film–and I realized that even as I sat in the theater, alone, watching it–but even though I could see it’s ham hands clear as day, it still brought the visceral reality of race and racism home in a way that good classes and discussions and books and documentaries never had. It brought racism home to me in a way that *being a Jew for my entire life* never had. I left the film in sort of a daze, because it was all so stupid and obvious and cornball, and yet I was silently, invisibly enraged.
Let that sink in: A box office flop starring John Travolta somehow managed to activate my sense of Justice in a way that growing up among Holocaust survivors could not.
If I’d watched that trailer alone, I would have written off Almost Human entirely, just another ham-handed big-budget cringefest no different than that jankety-ass looking Sleepy Hollow business. But I watched it with my boy, and instead wonder about the weird–and often sinister–power that these things have in our lives.

The “Liberator” 3D-Printed Plastic Pistol: A Thing You Don’t Have to Worry About #guns

Defense Distributed has been in the news off and on over the last half-year or so for their various “wiki weapons” 3D printed gun projects. The stated goal of founder Cody Wilson (a law student and hobby gun smith) is to obviate gun control legislation by making it possible for people to easily build guns from scratch in their homes using consumer-grade 3D printers. According to Wilson: “Anywhere there’s a computer and an Internet connection, there would be the promise of a gun.”
Up to now, DefDist was mostly known for their 3D-printed lower receiver (read “triggery bits” [UPDATE: I’ve *badly* mischaracterized the lower receiver here, and likewise botched the significance of a 3D-printed lower, in terms of gun control laws; I’ve added a footnote clearing that up.]) for the AR-15 (read “assault rifle”–this is the generic name for the popular, consumer-grade semi-auto version of the M16). The popularity of the AR-15 is based on the modulator of the platform–which, I know, makes it sound like a damn high-end camera, but that’s sort of the point of the AR-15: It appeals to a whole different demographic of shooters, distinct from “traditional” gun owners (who are largely hunters or target shooters). In other words, AR-15s are built to modify; if you want to “obviate legislated gun control,” then creating a durable, functional 3D-printed lower receiver for the AR-15 is a good first step, since it paves the way for “easy” full-auto conversion of the guns [UPDATE: this bit is also wrong; go look at that footnote!] (never mind that folks have been buying illegal conversion kits for ages; the point here is that it’s theoretically much harder to prevent the distribution of a few 3D printing files than it is to arrest some kook selling full-auto conversion kits out of his van in the gun-show parking lot).

But DefDist made a much bigger splash in the news earlier this month when they released their first fully 3D printed pistol (shown on the left), the “Liberator” (the name–and to some degree the design–is riffing on this). According to Wilson, since he’s now got a functional design for an almost-entirely 3D printed gun (it also needs a metal roofing nail, to function as the firing pin), gun control is officially silly and over and totally pointless: “Any bullet is now a weapon.”
The news media and Capitol Hill promptly freaked the fuck out.
Should you?
Nope.
I’ve done a little 3D printing, lots of dangerous DIY, and more than a little shooting. What do I see here? Well, this is a single-shot .380 pistol (.380 is a popular caliber for self-defense: it’s small and low-recoil, but packs about twice the punch of a .22LR, which is not generally considered a “lethal round”). I’ve never touched one of these plastic guns, but the Liberator almost certainly has poor compression and accuracy (see how short that barrel is?). It takes *hours* to print (reportedly four hours for the barrel alone, which is *single use*–more on that below) using a pro-grade 3D printer that costs nearly $10,000. It’s likely that this gun, if printed on one of the slightly-more-common consumer grade, like a MakerBot Replicator (sticker price: $2,500) would explode on the first shot.
But, hey, the design is solid, right? I mean, you can download the “ready-to-print” files right now; it’s plug-n-play. Or so the say. Once you dig into the documentation that goes along with the print files, you find this little note at the end:

Before firing a barrel, we recommend heating acetone to boiling and treating the barrel for ~30 seconds to decrease the inner diameter friction, which increases barrel life from 1 round to ~10 rounds. Note that we recommend printing multiple barrels and using each only once. Swapping the barrels is simple and fast: rotate the barrel to release the locking cam. Pull up on the barrel. If the barrel cam broke, turn the Liberator upside down to remove the debris. Then drop your new barrel in and rotate it until it locks.

Yup; you need to boil the barrel in nail-polish remover to strengthen it, and even then they aren’t suggesting you chance it by firing more than once. There are also *lots* of specific instructions on how parts need to be oriented during printing in order to maximize the material strength (because of the way this style of printer lays up material, the resulting parts are stronger along one axis)–and all that just barely squeezes out a workable one-shot pistol.
Just in case you’ve never used a 3D printer, let’s be clear that these are nowhere near as “consumer-ready” as breathless media accounts make them sound. There’s *a lot* of fiddling around with obtuse software and hardware configuration even to print something rudimentary (like a whistle or bottle opener), and even then there are *lots* of easy-to-miss details that render a print useless. Right now, this technology is much more akin to a CNC router than a desktop printer. It is *not* “plug-n-play.”
The notion that this somehow qualifies as a weapon *anyone* could make is laughable in the extreme. I don’t know a ton of people, but each of them would qualify as *anyone*–they include engineers, makers of all stripes, shooters, and even a bullet proof glass manufacturer, for God’s sake–and *none* of them could make this gun.
So, just to recap, in order to print this gun you need a $10,000-ish 3D printer, lots of time, training in an idiosyncratic sub-set of computer-aided design, and if you wanna be legal, possibly a federal license. Meanwhile, to legally *buy* a gun you need $20 to $50, and likely will not be challenged with any sort of background check or ID verification. Will the price of those printers come down? Sure. Will the feedstock for those printers get stronger? Sure. Will the software to use them become better and more approachable as the skills become more common? Highly likely. Are there plenty of folks who don’t give a damn about getting that license to manufacture guns? You betcha!
But does the Liberator–or any of DefDist’s shenanigans–have any real impact on the viability of legislated gun control?
Not one bit.
Why? Well, first off, because our nation’s pawn shops and gun shows *still* have buckets upon buckets of cheap-ass MP-25s kicking around.
But even if that wasn’t the case, even if our Magical Wish Granting President[1] magicked away all the bad guns yesterday, Wilson’s Liberator *still* wouldn’t move the needle on gun control, or freedom from government tyranny, or home-defense, or anything. Why?
Because today, right now, any of you reading this can do a lil googling, make a quick run to the hardware store, and build a safer, better zip gun with less than $10 in parts, no specialized skills, and tools you almost certainly already have in your garage. (DEPRESSING PRO-TIP: White supremacists are especially adept at disseminating cheap, utilitarian zip-gun designs.)
The takeaway: Every bullet already *is* a weapon. That’s the point of bullets. Wilson’s 3D-printed Liberator isn’t a gun, and certainly isn’t “proof” of anything; it’s a prop in a piece of clumsy political street-theater, and the core goal of this performance art seems to be making a virtue of laziness: “See! Hard problems are super-hard! It’s OK not to try and solve hard problems.”
Lurking behind all of this, once again, is the conviction that a technological solution can sweep away a social conflict, pretending as though the core question (“How do we address America’s ~100,000 annual gun-dependent injuries and deaths?”) no longer needs to be addressed because one small portion of one suggested solution seems like maybe it’s no longer as salient.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it likely comes as no shock when I point out that Cody Wilson is a young white-colored American male. I’ve noted over the years that young pinkish American men have the most acute difficulty in seeing how rarely technology magicks away our social problems.
There is some neat stuff going on with these DefDist “wiki weapons” projects–I like how the Liberator takes advantage of striation artifacts inherent in the printing process to make stronger components; I’d wondered about trying a nail-polish remover wash to mod 3D printed parts, and so I welcome Wilson’s stunning demonstration of efficacy–but the guns themselves aren’t one of the neat things. They’re sorta junky, and I’m having a lot of trouble in seeing how they bring *any* of us closer to a more perfect union, let alone anything approximating “Freedom.”
FURTHER READING: Farhad Manjoo has some interesting analysis here; I don’t know that I agree with the details (his thinking strikes me as narrative, which generally means it’s unlikely to predict what will actually happen), but I certainly agree with the broad strokes. If this is all piquing your interest, Forbes has *excellent* coverage on the development of the Plastic LIberator.

[UPDATE 05-14-2013] Almost immediately after I posted this Ben Brainerd–a friend with military small-arms training *and* extensive civilian gunsmithing experience–pointed out that the “AR lower [receiver] is not ‘triggery bits’. Those go *inside* the lower, and are currently pretty much impossible to 3D print.” He went on to explain that, for legal purposes, the lower receiver is the regulated portion of the gun, since it’s the key operable component. Thus, it’s the piece that bears the serial number. If you are buying a gun as components, the lower is the part that you need to get a background check before purchasing (provided you’re in a “background check” situation). Ergo, if you can produce a usable lower receiver *without* having to purchase one, you can effectively entirely sidestep in the background check issue, since all the other parts can be purchased without a check. (In an earlier Twitter conversation Ben had pointed out that none of this was really a game-changer anyway, since folks have long fabricated their own lower receivers, just to prove they could–for example, this AK-47 made from a shovel [FYI, beware of gleeful homophobia at that link]). So, while the 3D-printed lower receiver *does* make it easier for folks with no metal-working skill to circumvent some gun control efforts, it still requires expensive equipment and expertise, just in a different area (also, a little research indicated that even folks experienced with 3D printing and AR-type guns have had more than a little difficulty getting the kind of performance promised by DefDist for their 3D-printed plastic lower receiver).
So, *that’s* the point of the DefDist 3D-printed AR-15 lower receiver: Avoiding background checks. It doesn’t have any bearing on converting a semi-auto AR to full auto, because as Ben explained “anything in “fire control” (Trigger, hammer, bolt, etc) needs to be high-impact, so 3D is right out.” I suggest someone could fabricate these from steel at home using a CNC router–expensive gear, but I actually know folks who actually own them, so not that fanciful. Ben agreed: “CNC is how they’re made for real, for the most part, so yeah, that’d be the route for DIY conversion.” While large CNC routers are a specialized piece of gear few of us have in our homes, they are widely accessible (live in Ann Arbor, like me? Maker Works can hook you up–although they likely reserve the right to boot your ass out if you chose to make full-auto conversion kits in their facility), *lots* of folks know how to use them, and I’d be *shocked* to learn that the files for fabricating parts to do an auto-conversion on an AR-15 *aren’t* already floating around online. Oh, wait, 30 seconds of googling turned up an entire blog dedicated to using CNC machines to fabricate AR-15 parts–although not specifically for full-auto purposes. And a few more minutes turned up this page, which formerly hosted just such a file. So, yeah, it’s out there.

Continue reading “The “Liberator” 3D-Printed Plastic Pistol: A Thing You Don’t Have to Worry About #guns”

Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction

I spent much of the winter/early spring putting together a classroom reference on Chilean human rights abuses under Pinochet (one of my primary gigs is writing/editing these sorts of textbook-like things; more on that here). In the course of my research I sifted through a lot of FOIAed documents released by the CIA in the early 2000s (when they were forced to ‘fess up to Congress about their involvement with Pinochet as a condition of getting their budget money). Predictably, most of this stuff was at least partially redacted–and since it was all stuff form the 1970s-1990s, what I was looking at were PDFs of scans of actual hardcopy from which the offending words and phrases had been excised with a hobby knife. These pages are then stamped “SANITIZED,” which tends to imply something about the parts that were removed. (Here’s a representative sample; I love that the “one thing” Jesse Helms has to say is specifically redacted. I met Helms once, when I was a grade-schooler visiting Washington, DC. At the time I thought he looked like Boss Hogg, but very affable.)
Anyway, what struck me about these documents, these secrets, is that some human–likely a low-level clerk–went through all of these *very sensitive materials* and cut out those words. All day? Every day? Was this her whole job? Did every day end with a garbage can packed with word salad? In any case, still, some specific human saw all of these secrets unredacted; she knows what Helms’s one important thing to say to Kissinger about Chile and Pinochet was. She likely worked in a room *full* of people just like her, and they knew *all* the secrets. And they weren’t the only ones: Someone typed up this transcript. For every secret that’s deemed such by fat men in expensive suits, there’s someone at the bottom who could spill those beans. She’s wearing a cheap off-the-rack tweed skirt-and-jacket combo. Her blouse binds under her arms when she reaches up to fetch the next page out of her IN basket. She’s going to sip a Diet Tab while sitting on a concrete planter during her 30-minute lunch hour.
People with good salaries and lots to lose knew about what was happening in Chile; the new about the systemic use of rape and electricity, they knew about the “disappearances,” they knew about the torture camps, the new about the stadium *as it was happening.* They didn’t know rumors; they knew facts and names and places and numbers.
But also, plenty of people at the bottom, people with a lot less to lose, they knew these things, too. Not as much, and not in an organized way, but each of them knew a few things. Probably all of the individual things seemed sort of pointless and unintelligible. But they had to occasionally talk, right? Occasionally glance at each other’s work loads? Occasionally read something in the Washington Post months later and say “Hold up; I’ve seen that document. I . . . I know what Jesse Helms’s one thing he had to say was!”
So, in the front of my mind I was editing together this book on Chile, so that high schoolers in America could know about what was done to folks just a year or two older then them in Chile in the name of thwarting Communism. But in the back of my head, I thought a lot about those women at their desks with their hobby knives and their IN baskets.
But I didn’t go further, and think at all about the job itself; I was too wrapped up in the people. And, when you start to think about it, the job is pretty crazy.
So, I was delighted to come across Alex Wellerstein’s recent post to his Restricted Data blog, where-in he really fully explores the bureaucratic curiosity that is redaction:
The Problem of Redaction | Restricted Data

Redaction is one of those practices we take for granted, but it is actually pretty strange if you think about it. I mean, who would imagine that the state would say, “well, all of this is totally safe for public consumption, except for a part right here, which is too awful to be legally visible, so I’ll just blot out that part. Maybe I’ll do it in black, maybe in white, maybe I’ll add DELETED in big bold letters, just so I know that you saw that I deleted it.”
From a security perspective, it’s actually rather generous. The redactor is often giving us the context of the secret, the length of the material kept from us (a word? a sentence? a paragraph? a page?), and helpfully drawing our eye to the parts of the document that still contain juicy bits. The Onion’s spoof from a few years back, “CIA Realizes It’s Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years,” is only slightly off from the real truth. Blacking something out is only a step away from highlighting its importance, and the void makes us curious. . . .

Bats, Their Tongues, and Their Eating Habits (@hypomodern, @logista, @vaguery, & @dgoings)

The other day, over breakfast, my first-grader asked how long it would take a vampire bat to drain a pig. I, of course, had no idea. Fortunately, we live in an Age of Wonders:
A quick trip to Wikipedia informed me that “A typical female vampire bat weighs 40 grams and can consume over 20 grams (1 fluid ounce) of blood in a 20-minute feed.” From prior experience buying live hogs and arranging for their slaughter and processing (don’t ask), I knew that there were something like 10 or 12 pounds of blood in a pig. A quick Google confirmed that it averaged around 9.5 pounds of extractable blood, which is conveniently roughly 9.5 pints, or 152 fluid ounces.
So, if she could feed nonstop (which she can’t), then a vampire bat could exsanguinate a very calm pig in roughly 50 hours. Alternately, a single bat could feed off a single pig for 152 days (at one fluid once per day) before the little fella was bone dry. *But*, I told him, we need to keep in mind that 1 fl. oz. is a very small amount of blood, and that the body regenerates blood regularly. People regularly give a pint, and it doesn’t seem to take more than a week for them to bounce back. Sorry, buddy, but I don’t think the little bat would *ever* drain the pig.
*Booom!* Question answered!
Kinda.
Because not knowing that blood replenishment rate was bugging me, so I started Googling again, and *holy crap!*, it takes a lot longer than I thought to make back that pint you gave the Red Cross! I’m not sure how fast pigs replace blood, but humans do so at around three fluid ounces per week–which is a bit under half an ounce per day an average. So, if the bat hit the same average pig for a fluid ounce each night, the pig would make half of that back the next day (in theory), meaning that to actually exsanguinate a live pig, the vampire bat would have to invest most of a year.
*But* how much blood can a pig loose before he keels over? Or before the body’s built-in replenishment system goes off the rails? I haven’t the *foggiest*–although life experience tells me that a human can lose *more than half her blood volume* and still be perfectly functional (albeit kinda logy, and certainly pale). So how long could a healthy pig go if it was being plagued nightly by a vampire bat? Clearly more than half a year. Maybe three quarters? At what time does that bat use its sharp lil teeth to carve “SOME PIG” into the wall of the barn?
Anyway, in the end, this seemed like an *excellent* teachable moment:
Remember, kids, given a persistent spirit and enough time, even the humblest vampire bat can completely drain the mightiest swine.
Why there is no children’s book with this as its central motif is, frankly, a stumper to me.
At any rate, the day after that momentary diversion on our way to the grave, I came across this, and it just sorta seemed like I *had* to share it. So I am.

(thx to these friendly Twitterati for checking my blood math: @hypomodern, @logista, @vaguery, and @dgoings!!!)

Penn & Teller do an excellent deconstructed cups-and-balls routine, teach you to write

Penn & Teller Explain Ball & Cups on Jonathan Ross 2010.07.09 (Part 2) – YouTube

This presentation of the cups and balls (a trick that is downright “*ancient*) isn’t just an incredibly graceful and concise primer on magic, but also on that triple-point of storytelling, narrative, and persuasion. It highlights the shared, emergent linchpin that’s vital to entertaining someone, explaining something to them, and getting them to see things the way you want them seen.
How wanna be a good writer? And I don’t mean “a good novelist” or “a good copywriter” or “a good essayist”–I mean good at all three, good at the stuff that’s way down below all of these visible structures, down in the roots? Then you could do much, much worse than watching this video over and over and over again.

See Project Orion! To Mars in an A-Bomb-Powered Sleigh!

For those who’ve never heard of Project Orion, Wikipedia is as good a place to start as any:

Project Orion was a study of a spacecraft intended to be directly propelled by a series of explosions of atomic bombs behind the craft (nuclear pulse propulsion). Early versions of this vehicle were proposed to have taken off from the ground with significant associated nuclear fallout; later versions were presented for use only in space.

–which, yea, sounds pretty patently nuts. But keep reading, and it begins to look *really* attractive:

The Orion concept offered high thrust and high specific impulse, or propellant efficiency, at the same time. The unprecedented extreme power requirements for doing so would be met by nuclear explosions, of such power relative to the vehicle’s mass as to be survived only by using external detonations without attempting to contain them in internal structures. As a qualitative comparison, traditional chemical rockets—such as the Saturn V that took the Apollo program to the Moon—produce high thrust with low specific impulse, whereas electric ion engines produce a small amount of thrust very efficiently. Orion would have offered performance greater than the most advanced conventional or nuclear rocket engines then under consideration. Supporters of Project Orion felt that it had potential for cheap interplanetary travel, but it lost political approval over concerns with fallout from its propulsion.

They actually made demo prototypes of this bomb-drive, in order to convince government backers that it was *less* nuts than it sounded, and it does indeed looks pretty rad:
Project Orion: “To Mars by A-Bomb” RARE Footage – YouTube

Here’s the full declassified footage those clips are culled from:
Project Orion [nuclear propulsion] (1958) – YouTube

Anyway, if this lil sidebar in the history of the atomic bomb tickled your fancy, then you can do worse then losing a few hours sifting through Alex Wellerstein’s Restricted Data blog. Start here: The “Secret” song | Restricted Data

Holy Crap! Is This Ever Wonderful and CREEEEEPY!

Władysław Starewicz (sometimes Russified as “Vladislav Starevich,” with his surname just generally butchered as “Starevitch,” “Starewich,” and “Starewitch”–damn Polish trick alphabet! He later changed it altogether to make it easier on Francophones, calling himself “Ladislas Starevich”) became famous as a Polish-Russian-French animator, a line he sort inadvertently fell into. His first career was as Director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania. In making documentaries on animal behavior for the museum, he found himself stymied when the nocturnal stag beetles he wanted to film fighting would go to sleep under the bright lights required by earlier motion-picture cameras. So, he faked up the stag-beetle fight in stop motion, and after that he was off to the races. After fleeing several wars and uprising, he wound up settled in France, where he would do most of his greatest work.
Starewicz’s 1933 film, The Mascot (aka “Duffy the Mascot”, “Puppet Love,” or “The Devil’s Ball” [?!?]) , is widely regarded not just as Starewicz’s best work, nor as one of the best stop-motion films ever made, nor even as one of the best animations ever made, but as among the greatest short films ever made (the most notable film aficionado to take that position is Terry Gilliam, predictably). Thanks to the Internet, you can judge that on your own. Without a doubt, it is one of the most endearingly creepy films I’ve ever seen:

I got the tip on this from this Slate article, showcasing another film made by Starewicz, The Cameraman’s Revenge:

I *love* that Starewicz imbeds the middle of his movie into the end of his movie. Also, that it’s such a Russian-style “happy ending.”
If all this has you feeling inspired, you can do worse than dropping a buck or two on an iPhone app (which my son and I continue to occasionally monkey with).

How the Textbooks Get Made (or “The Writer’s Life for Me”)

I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. In the latest I take a break from talking about guns and “gun control,” and instead talking about my actual work-life as a freelance writer/editor:
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Not Safe for Work

Illustrative example: I recently put together a classroom reference on Internet pornography (not kidding). The book consists of a couple dozen point-counterpoint pairs on topics like “Access to online porn does/doesn’t encourage rape” or “Teen/preteen sexting should/shouldn’t be prosecuted as child pornography” – fun stuff like that.
I hunt down these articles, then revise and massage them so that they’re high-school accessible, because that’s the market for this book – high school libraries. That’s my job:
I write reference works on pornography aimed at high schoolers.
I’ve also done books like this on drugs and teen sex. I don’t even know what to say about my life, except that if you had told 12-year-old me that this was how it was going to end up, that kid would high-five you all over the place.
The only time a lay person hears about what goes into a textbook is when some jerkwater school board in North Carolina mandates that they aren’t buying anything with this untested evolution crap in it, or whatever.
I’ve done this about a dozen times (not counting projects I ultimately passed on because the money or timing were wrong). And I gotta tell you, the editorial guidelines have never remotely approached that kind of political micromanagement. More than politics, “expedience” and “balance” are the rule.
. . .

Travelwide: An Ultralight Point-and-Shoot Large-Format Camera for Under $100

Wanderlust Cameras (aka Justin Lundquist and Ben Syverson–both are awesome photographers with some pretty tight 3D design and fabrication chops, and Lundquist is also my brother-in-law) are just wrapping up the Kickstarter campaign for their newest project: The Travelwide 4×5 Large-formate Point-and-Shoot.

“Large-format” cameras take pictures using *negatives* that are 4-by-5 *inches* or larger–which is pretty frickin’ huge, when you think about a traditional 35mm image (which is a bit bigger than a postage stamp) or the CCD sensors in a digital camera (which tend to be less than .5-inch square). A larger negative (or sensor) means higher image resolution and finer color gradation. Large-format is the way much professional photography is done, and is big with hobbyists–but it’s expensive (used large-format rigs start at a several hundred dollars and quickly climb into the thousands) and heavy (these are big hunks of steel).
Lundquist and Syverson have designed a super-light, precise, basically indestructible large-format camera body that accepts existing lenses (which can be bought used for pennies on the dollar). Since Lundquist and Syverson made their name producing the best pinhole “lens” available for Micro 4/3 mirrorless digital cameras (you can buy one here, or learn more about it from this article I wrote for issue 9 of The Magazine), they’ve also included a removable pinhole aperture for their Travelwide. Here’s a sample pinhole pic taken using that setup:

And here’s a little more background on their design and development process for this camera.
I’m not sure if the price will pop up once the Kickstarter campaign is through, but for the next 10 days you can lock in a $100 pre-order for this camera –which gets you what is, without a doubt, the most precise large-format pinhole camera on the market today, with the added bonus that you can easily swap in a pro lens, or mount after-market range-finders, flashes, tripods, and other accessories on the thing. Final bonus: The thing is 100% Made in the USA.
Light enough to drag around backcountry Brazil, tight enough to use for a pro-shoot, cheap enough to experiment out in the grit and the rain without constantly worrying that you’re gonna wreck the damn thing.

Chill with Me at the Up in the Aether Steampunk Convention!

Hey All,
Just a quick note that I’ll be a panelist/guest at the Up in the Aether steampunk convention: May 24–26 at the Detroit/Dearborn Double Tree hotel (5801 Southfield Expressway, Detroit, MI, 48228). Super fun last year, with some great panels/demos/classes and vendors. Promises to be even bigger this year, with even more panels and workshops (including a full-bore lit track, plus lots of DIY of all sorts), *and* the location is right by the Henry Ford Museum (whose collection is bound to thrill any folks with steampunkish leanings).

Anyway, I’ll be at Up in the Aether all three days, sitting on a variety of panels talking about steampunk, history, writing, horror, and the nitty-gritty of publication. I’ll also be running a couple DIY workshops, one on building old-school kites, and the other on flash-boilers and building a simple flash-boiler powered steam putt-putt boat.
See you there! If you wanna connect and hi-five (or whatever) please feel free to ping me via email or twitter @SquiDaveo. Thanks!