cybergeisha

This picture of Carmen, Kurt, Erick and I was taken at the Death Guild Thunderdome fundraiser on Saturday, in San Francisco. Yes, we are all totally awesome.

And here’s Carmen’s totally awesome hair, and me looking amused at Kurt.

U.S. spacecraft lands safely at Mars north pole

Pulled by Mars’ gravity, Phoenix was tearing along at 12,700 mph before it entered the atmosphere, which slowed the craft so it could pop out a parachute and fire thruster rockets to gently float to the ground.

“It’s down, baby, it’s down!,” yelled a NASA flight controller, looking at signals from Mars showing that Phoenix had landed.

I can’t even put into words how excited I was about this landing.

I watched the Phoenix Lander touch down live on TV yesterday afternoon and it was seriously one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in a long time. That “hold your breath” feeling, listening to the mission control live audio feed and watching everyone FLIP OUT when they announced “PHOENIX… PHOENIX HAS LANDED.”

Rock on, Phoenix! :D

Introduction

Readers, fans, random passers-by…. I would like to welcome you to cybergeisha.net’s world première episode of NEWS OF THE WEIRD - weird things I’ve found on the Internet lately. It could be a website, a product, a news story, even a photo or a quote. But above all else, it’s weird, and I’ve got plenty to say about it.

Here, we have our first offering,.

The Crustastun – World’s first Humane Electronic Crustacean Stunner

A revolutionary system For the first time ever a humane, simple and effective way to stun and kill shellfish prior to cooking.

It goes on to explain why they developed this product, further into the website. Let’s take a look, shall we?

To many, present methods of killing (chopping, drowning in freshwater, boiling, frying & basting - alive) are barbaric and the recommended methods (cooling in ice-slurry or spiking the several nerve centres) unproven, difficult and impractical. The Crustastun applies an instant current which anaesthatises the Crab, Lobster or other shellfish within a fraction of a second and kills within seconds.

First of all… If you bought fresh live lobster… You have *GASP* to kill it yourself. You’re setting out to do the age old act ingrained in our DNA — slaughtering something for food. That’s not pretty. I understand that.

But I can’t understand all of this wibbling about “how much pain they can feel” or “what gives them the least pain.” Why? Why focus on this? They will not suffer any more than if they’d been eaten (ALIVE) by another animal. Let’s keep that perspective for a second. Given the choice between “Body Torn Limb from Limb As I’m Eaten Alive” and “Head Chopped Off” and “Boiled Alive” I’d take “head chopped off” or “immediately immersed in boiling water” any day.

The question isn’t, to me, what the lobsters feel or think. It’s what we project onto the lobsters. What WE find horrifying, inhumane, humiliating, mean and wrong, from the perspective of whether we would want to endure it. That’s how we figure out how HUMANE it is.

applies the humane slaughter principles currently applied to higher food animals such as cows, sheep and pigs to shellfish, […]

Higher food creatures. That brings up a really good point. How good ARE our “standards” for “higher” creatures? Pretty good in general. Know why? You don’t usually slaughter a pig, cow, or sheep at your home. Lobsters, fish, shellfish and the like are small enough to be slaughtered at home. So do they need to be held to meat-packing “Standards?”

It’s just a lobster, people.

What was that? You, in the audience. Oh, I see. No, no, it’s a good question. No, I do not eat lobster. It’s not because I think it’s inhumane or too expensive or too messy or anything… I just don’t like them. I don’t like the meat of crustaceans/arthropods so I don’t eat it. It is that simple — no moral high ground here.

The way I see it, they are bugs. Big, ocean-dwelling, arthropods that crawl around in the sea mud. Some people could make the argument that “well, you kill spiders and stomp cockroaches (a very close relative of the lobster), and a lobster is pretty much a bug, too, so…..”

I think it’s more than that. I don’t even know that it’s about “how much pain” a lobster can handle or being “humane.” It seems like it’s more about how much projected pain WE perceive the lobster as going through. How sorry we feel for the lobster through empathy - would you want to be in a tank with your hands tied together, bored, with nothing to do but wait for someone to come and buy you? No. That would be inhumane. But….

————   N E W S   F L A S H ! ! !   ————

LOBSTERS ARE NOT HUMAN

It’s true. As I mentioned before… crustaceans/arthropods are not human and I’m not sure why we keep trying to say that they need to be humanely killed — I view all of the listed methods of lobster slaughtering to be acceptible for what is being achieved.

Maybe we should start “putting down” cows, sheep, and pigs before we kill them, similar to how we do with our pets, rather than inhumanly driving them into a Meat Machine where they will be killed by robots and dismantled ad come out the other side as a side of bacon.

Or maybe as a whole, people should just get over it!

Do we NEED a device SOLELY MADE to “humanely” electrocute lobsters?

My friends, I do not think we need this. It’s just… well, it’s unnecessary, and it makes us seem like we’re a bunch of wussies.

Shoes that grow with your feet

A new type of children’s shoes will save parents from rushing to the shops so often - because the shoes grow with them.

Well, that just sounds creepy. To me, anyway, it sounds like you put the shoe on the kid and it becomes a part of the body or something. Eek! Shoes that grow!?

But then, I read further:

The Daily Telegraph reports that Inchworm shoes can extend by one full shoe size - so all parents need to do is adjust the shoe to fit.

This is done by pressing a button on the side of the shoes and extending the toe out to the correct length.

Damn. That doesn’t sound creepy at all. It just sounds weird and uncomfortable. I can’t imagine that shoes that adjust “up to three sizes” could be anything but wretchedly uncomfortable.

When it comes down to it, I think I like the creepy “growing” shoes idea better.

Yesterday, Erik and I went to the Pacific Science Center.

It was so fun! When I was a little girl, it was my very favorite place to go in the entire world. Like, seriously - I liked going there more than going anywhere else. Maybe that’s why I love science so much as an adult - I was exposed to it often and in a fun, interactive way as a child.

There are so many cool things to see and do at the science center. It’s all geared towards kids, ostensibly, but it’s fun for people of all ages. It’s all interactive science - they have stuff like a scale you can step on that tells you how much you weigh on all the planets and a display where you can input different numbers into the Drake Equation and see the result.

There’s also a big display of animatronic dinosaurs that they’ve had for more than 20 years - it was my favorite when I was a little girl! The best thing is that they keep it updated and fresh, with new discoveries and science. Other favorites that have been there since I was young is a replica of the Gemini spacecraft - Erik and I climbed in and took a bunch of pictures, flipped the switches, and generally goofed around like we were little kids.

The switches and knobs all work, they light up, and it’s incredible to be in there and realize how freakin’ uncomfortable and tiny it is. And people went to SPACE in a tiny little thing JUST LIKE IT! It’s incredible. Science is so cool. Just thinking about the fact that humans have figured out how to go to space, carbon date things, synthesize natural stuff in a lab… wow.

There’s a big display of stuff called “Body Works” where you can do different stuff like see how you can transform kinetic energy to electricity by riding a stationary bike that lights up a string of light bulbs, try to balance on a pole, look at a human skeleton, test your eyesight, hearing and reaction time.

There was also an industrial robot against which you can play tic-tac-toe, in the robot display. Fun!

Their special exhibit right now is “Strange Matter,” which is all about strange properties of matter, like gloppy mud-like stuff that you can play with and then hit a button and it’ll “freeze up” because the button activates a magnetic field. Lots of stuff like magnetic liquids, man, I wish I’d gotten some pictures of that. Highly recommended!

Other favorites were teh shadow wall, where you can stand against a wall in a dark room, a flash bulb goes off and you can see your shadow, a tide pool display where you can touch sea anemones, and an oscilloscope where you could turn two knobs to change the tones and look at the shape generated.

And possibly most beautiful, they had an activity where you had to use suction cups to move a metal ball into a little cup and it looked AWESOME… but it was really difficult!

The Science Center is also home to the IMAX theatre and the planetarium. We planned to go to the planetarium show at 4PM, so we took a break after 2 hours of science fun and went to Bamboo Garden, our favorite Chinese restaurant in Seattle. All their food is vegan, but so delicious! You can’t even tell it’s vegan. I didn’t even know, the first time I went there! It’s right across from Seattle Center so we just walked there.

I’m not sure what was up with all those warning signs… It was a big empty PARKING LOT with no visible construction equipment or anything. Heh. Lunch was delicious, as it has been every time I’ve gone to Bamboo Garden.

We made it back to the Science Center with plenty of time to spare before the planetarium show so we poked around at some of the space-related exhibits, looked at the boa constrictors, and gave some love to Jupiter. It may be a failed star… but it’s not a failure in our hearts. Awwww.

The planetarium show was awesome. It was fun and informative, the guy who gave the presentation was funny. We decided we need to build our own planetarium. That’d be sweet.

We stopped before leaving and I went in to the Tropical Butterfly House (Erik didn’t want to go in, maybe he doesn’t like butterflies…). I hadn’t seen that before - it wasn’t there when I used to go to the Science Center as a child. But it was SO COOL! There were all of these gorgeous, exotic butterflies fluttering around! I took a few pictures, and one even landed on my head (no picture of that, unfortunately).

It was very warm and moist in the butterfly house, obviously, since it was a tropical butterfly habitat. The butterflies were EVERYWHERE! You had to go through this “air lock” sort of entrance and exit to make sure the butterflies didn’t get out.

I don’t have a lot of pictures of Erik and I together, since I’m usually the one with the camera. But I took a few yesterday. I’m really angry that my camera is broken, all these great pictures have a big dark patch in the middle. Afterwards, we went out for coffee at Vivace, and he gave me a hug and we went home. It was a ton of fun - yesterday was a good day.