Holy Shit, Stanislav Petrov!

Recognize the guy in the photo? It's unlikely that you do, but I'm not going to tell you not to feel bad about it. Because that man is Stanislav Petrov, and you very likely owe him your life.

The year was 1983, and the U.S. and Soviet Union were playing for keepsies. Their on-again-off-again relationship was decidedly in the off-again setting, and the U.S. said, "Hey, you know what would be a lot of fun in an atmosphere of extreme geopolitical tension and nuclear paranoia? A war game with unprecedented realism that makes it look like we're about to nuke the shit out of Russia!"

Shit's on fire, yo.

The Soviet Union wasn't too fond of the idea. Especially since it kind of looked like their longtime rival was actually planning to rain hell fire onto their faces. They saw enormous forces massed on their borders. They saw fully armed nuclear bombers coming right to the edge of and sometimes slightly within their airspace before turning away. They saw unprecedented mobilization. And they started to flip a shit.

That's where Mr. Petrov comes in. Stanislav Petrov was an officer in the Soviet Air Defense Program in charge of monitoring their Early Warning System. On September 26, 1983, said system blipped. A blip on your "We're All Gonna Die" radar is literally the last thing you ever want to see in that situation. But there it was. A blip headed straight for the Motherland.

OH GOD, DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT.

Stanislav the Manislav, being a reasonable man(islav), figured that a single blip could easily be a defect. "Something must be tripping up the system," he told himself. So he decided not to report it. As he came to that decision, four more blips appeared. So now there were five possible missiles headed into town to get rip-roaring, rowdy, and...you know...nuclear.

At this point, Stanislav neglected his duty. He declined to report the attack. It was still a small number, and the reliability of the system had been questioned before, so he took it upon himself to not worry the top brass with it. It's a goddamn good thing, too, because the top brass had an itchy trigger finger and an unhealthy dose of panic at that moment. If they had any reason to believe the U.S. was launching a nuclear strike, they would not hesitate to end life on Earth.

Luckily, Mr. Petrov was 100% correct. Sunlight was in perfect alignment with a few high altitude clouds and the satellites used to track potential missiles, which caused the false alarm. After a brief moment of panic on November 9th, when Able Archer 83 simulated a movement to Defcon 1 (meaning imminent nuclear strike), NATO forces packed it all in and went back to their regularly scheduled mild panic.

As for Petrov, he was removed to a less sensitive position. A lateral move, you'll be happy to know. He was neither punished nor rewarded for his actions, but his direct superiors praised him and said that his actions were "correct."

Many years later, after the story was made public, Petrov was much more justly rewarded. The Association of World Citizens gave him their World Citizen Award. Twice. And a documentary was made about him, aptly titled The Man Who Saved the World.

Because he did that.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Sparta!

300, the graphic novel and subsequent film, gives you a basic outline of the Battle of Thermopylae. Persia comes marching across the Hellespont across pontoon bridges with their slaves, lesbians, mythical rhinoceroses and androgynous emperor all clamoring for an end to this new freedom thing the Greeks seem so keen on.

WHEN'S THE LAST TIME FREEDOM GAVE YOU TWO KNEELING GOLDEN BIPEDAL BULLS? NEVER, THAT'S WHEN.

King Leonidas takes 300 volunteers to Thermopylae against the traitorous pacifists' orders and dies heroically while inspiring all of Greece to stand up for good old-fashioned American Greek Freedom and fight the terrorists Persians until they go back to their desert hovels in shame. All the while Queen Cersei Gorgo is ranting about how freedom ain't free and stabbing liberals traitors in public.

Neat story.

But it's irredeemable bullshit.

You tried your best.

Let's start with the traitors.

In ancient Sparta, there was no such thing as a pacifist. We're talking about a culture that practiced wide spread infanticide if their babies didn't look like soldiers. If you weren't a brutally oppressed slave, you were born and bred to be a weapon of mass destruction. So no, there was no pacifist traitor arguing against going to war in Sparta. There was an actual religious festival that legally prevented all of Sparta from taking up arms, and the rest of the city-state was fully prepared to join the 300 (and several thousand other Greeks) after it was done.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you miss the part about slavery and oppression? Because boy oh boy, Sparta was awfully fond of that. There was a whole class of people in Sparta called Helots. Their entire purpose was to grovel at the Spartans' feet and do all the work of feeding and maintaining the city-state so that their masters had time to live and breathe combat. It's important to remember that there's more to freedom than "some people can vote."

Freedom.

But what about the villains?! The Persians! The terrible oriental threat to what we somehow justify calling "freedom," even though the most Democratic ones were the Athenians, derisively (and very ironically) referred to as "boy lovers" by Leonidas in 300 -- and even they weren't totally on board with letting the hoi polloi have a meaningful voice.

Well, the Persians...didn't really practice slavery. Not in the same way or nearly on the same scale as the Spartans. When they did, it's thought that their slaves were usually prisoners of war temporarily being used for labor, and they were treated like the Geneva Convention was a thing (which, you'll note, it wasn't).

A bit weather-worn, but he looks like a nice enough fella.

So where did Frank Miller get the idea that the Greco-Persian Wars were a battle between Freedom and Evil? Take a wild guess. If you guessed, "Western historians wear our-ancestors-were-the-shit tinted glasses and Frank Miller is an off-the-deep-end Neo-Con," congratulations! You're capable of critical thought. Western Civilization has always been seen as a descendent of Greek Civilization, so of course our historians have traditionally considered them the good guys. And Frank Miller called the Occupy Wall Street movement "nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists," so you can make a pretty fair assumption about his political leanings.

Please tell me you saw the parallels.

Making the Spartans into freedom fighters, though? That's just being lazy with your research.

Oh, hey, remember how I said it was ironic that Leonidas called Athens a city of "boy lovers?" You should, it was just about two paragraphs ago. Well, Sparta was one of the first Greek city-states to institutionalize Pederasty. Pederasty being a formal erotic relationship between a grown man and an adolescent boy. Yeah. Institutionalized pedophilia. That's what we're cheering for in 300.

I'll give Sparta one thing: they were the masters of wartime wit (and wartime in general, but bear with me here). Most of the badass one-liners in 300 come straight out of the history books, but my personal favorite happened much later. Alexander the Great's father, Philip II of Macedon, decided he wanted to round up the whole of Greece under his banner. He sent the following message to Sparta:

"You are advised to surrender immediately, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city."

Sparta's reply was typically laconic:

"If."

That's his "If" face.

Phillip left them the hell alone. His son, Alexander the Great, arguably the greatest conqueror the world has ever known?

Also left them alone. Apparently a single word was more than enough.


Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Brood Parasites!

I was out in my backyard the other day when I heard an unfamiliar birdsong. Not a particularly rare one, but one I hadn't heard in my backyard before. It was this li'l fella:

I had to know what it was. Luckily, I got a good glimpse of him, and if you google "black bird with a brown head" he's the first three hundred results. Meet the conveniently named Brown-headed Cowbird, one of the biggest assholes of the avian world.

You see, the Brown-headed Cowbird is what ornithologists refer to as a brood parasite. Brood parasites are a bunch of lazy sons of bitches who can't be bothered to raise their own children. Instead, they lay their eggs in other species' nests. Like Phoebes.

She's lost a lot of weight since Friends

Imagine you're a pleasant little Eastern Phoebe, off hunting some insects or extra insulation for your freshly laid eggs. When you come back to your nest, you see that some nefarious Cowbird has surreptitiously placed her blatantly non-Phoebe egg in your very much Phoebe nest.

It's like they're not even trying to be subtle. (Spoiler Alert: They aren't)

You decide that enough is enough. You'll tolerate sharing the bird feeder with other species, but this is just insufferable. You nudge the damn thing over the edge of the nest and let it fall.

You've just made a terrible mistake. That's the avian equivalent of trying to abduct Michael Coreleone's children, and I mean that as literally as you can possibly mean a comparison between a Pacino character and a mid-sized bird.

What Cowbirds do in response is gleefully referred to as "mafia behavior." If a bird disposes of their free-as-in-kittens-not-as-in-beer eggs, the Cowbird will return to the nest and wreck the everloving shit out of it in furious vengeance.

It's a courtship dance, but I choose to think of it as him making an offer she can't refuse.

 
This behavior has been around for so long that smaller birds have adapted to it. Most of the time, if a Phoebe sees a suspicious egg in its nest, it'll gulp heavily and go about its business, raising the new chick as its own. Even though that often means the Phoebe's own offspring will be casually murdered by the much bigger and more demanding mafia bird baby.

All this comes down to one delightfully terrifying thought: Birds run protection rackets.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Ancient Graffiti!

Graffiti, right? What a symbol of the decadence of modern times. Vandalizing the pristine walls of our cities with crudely drawn filth, for the most part. If only we looked to our precursors, from the days when respect for elders, institutions, and architecture were commonplace. What would we find if we looked to the glory days of, say, the Roman Empire?

Oh.

As it turns out, nostalgia isn't the best lens through which to look at history. Graffiti is nothing new, and the citizens of the Roman Empire were among the worst offenders we know of. That's not to say they were actually the worst offenders. We just know more about it. Because one of the most catastrophic natural disasters of the ancient world was a boon to Classicists and historians.

Way to take one for the team, guys.

When Mt. Vesuvius blew its literal top and buried Pompeii, Herculaneum, and several other towns in superheated pyroclastic rock, the towns (and in many cases, the people) were preserved in pristine condition. That left us with walls containing a ton of unfaded graffiti.

Graffiti, the stuff that we sigh and shake our heads at today, ended up being one of the most important primary resources we have about life in Ancient Rome. It's an honest, uncensored glimpse of how literate Pompeiians interacted with each other. What official history book could ever give us that?

To be honest, any history that begins with infants suckling a wolf's teat should be taken with a grain of salt.

So what was Latin graffiti like? Let's just say it was colorful. Here are a few examples:

• LUCIUS PINXIT - "Lucius wrote this." It's like they saw what tagging would be in 2000 years and decided to out-mundane us.
• APOLLINARIS, MEDICUS TITI IMPERATORIS HIC CACAVIT BENE - "Apollinaris, doctor of Emperor Titus, took a good shit here."
• VIRGULA TERTIO SU: INDECENS ES. - "Virgula to Teritus: You are a nasty boy." Saucy.
• SUSPIRIUM PUELLAM CELADUS THRAEX - "Celadus makes the girls moan."

The moral of the story here is that there are hooligans in every culture throughout history, even revered cultures with gravitas and a rich legacy like Rome. That's not a bad thing, either, because it has the potential to preserve a culture much more honestly than official records might. While we're on the subject, though, let's not get too hung up on the gravitas of a culture that produced this:

I mean...I know he's a god and all, but...come on.

That's the kind of thing high society commissioned in Pompeii. Someone got paid to paint comically oversized dongs on other people's walls.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Girl in the Closet!

Once upon a time in 2008, a Japanese man was troubled. I'm sure he wasn't the only one, but his reason for being troubled was somewhat unique. See, he had gone grocery shopping not long ago, and suddenly he found he was missing food that he knew he should have had. Feeling dumbfounded and a little bit peckish, he decided to set up security cameras to find out how presumably wild animals were getting into his home.

"Why you gotta make a thing of this?"

Now, I want you to imagine this is you. You know food is going missing, so you set up security cameras. You leave the house, locking all the doors and windows behind you. When you come back, you decide to check the footage, just in case. Nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen. Then, out of nowhere, a woman shows up in the kitchen on screen and starts rummaging through the fridge. She takes out some food then goes back to wherever she's hiding.

And it occurs to you after seeing the video that she's there right now.

This would be roughly my face

Being reasonable and terrified, the concerned homeowner immediately called the police, who came right away and searched the house. After an extensive search, they found the woman buried deep in a closet with some food and a small mattress. She was immediately arrested and removed. When questioned, she said she just didn't have anywhere else to go.

It's sad, I know, and you want to feel bad for the homeless woman, but put yourself in the man's position here. Your food goes missing, and when you take steps to find out why it turns out there's a homeless person in your house right now without your knowledge.

One more thing. Before her discovery, the woman had been living secretly in the closet for over two months.


Holy shit. Have fun sleeping tonight.

Holy Shit, the Internet!

Take a step back and think about the damn Internet. Just think about it. Because holy shit, right? You're sitting at a computer (or standing with a phone) and reading my thoughts, and you can do that even if you're thousands of miles away.

Carl Sagan once said "Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic." Books carry ideas through time. The Internet carries ideas through space, and it does so almost instantaneously.

Incidentally, by invoking his assessment I'm proving it right

I mean, my god, look at Twitter. Go there, type "monkey" in the search bar, and you'll see what people all over the world are saying about monkeys. Go to YouTube and you'll find eight years of video uploaded every day. From everywhere. Go to Amazon and you can have almost anything delivered to your doorstep within a few days (or one day if you don't mind paying extra). Go to Wikipedia and you'll find what basically amounts to the sum total of human knowledge.

The fact that we have Wi-Fi and data plans on phones just makes the Internet even more astounding. In the late 1970s, Science fiction/comedy writer Douglas Adams began writing stories about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The eponymous guide is an electronic book that contains all the most important knowledge of the Galaxy. It's portable and accessible anytime, anywhere.

And it has this in big, friendly letters on the cover.

With Wi-Fi and smart phones coupled with Wikipedia, we have that now. Even better, we have an interactive version of it. We have forums where you can ask someone on the other side of the world to clarify something confusing, and the device you use to make that connection fits in your goddamn pocket. Can we shut up about flying cars and agree that this is the future? Because we have, in many ways surpassed 20th Century science fiction.

I'll leave you with Isaac Asimov. In 1991, he saw the potential of computer networking, and in an interview he talked at length about its potential for use in education:

What he's talking about is the Internet. He nailed it twenty-two years ago. You might say he didn't expect people to be wasting time with things like My Little Pony fan fiction, but I think he covered that pretty well when he said, "However silly it might seem to someone else, that's what you're interested in." That's the Internet for you. For better or worse, it's the epitome of democratic education.

And it's my link to everyone from friends in San Francisco and strangers in Japan.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Robert Ballard!

In the summer of 1985, Robert Ballard set off on an expedition to find the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. Using side-scan sonar to map the ocean floor, his team noticed some irregular terrain which, upon further inspection, turned out to be debris from the infamous shipwreck. The following year, he returned with DSV Alvin (the same Alvin that explored the Marianas Trench) and got a detailed photographic record of the site.

Old age and the weight of the entire goddamn ocean have not been kind to her.

Here's the thing, though: part of that first paragraph is not, strictly speaking, true. Robert Ballard did not, in fact, set off on an expedition to find the wreckage of the RMS Titanic. That was his cover story. In reality, he was working as a US naval intelligence officer and searching for the wreckage of two nuclear powered submarines.

To be fair, Ballard himself really was in it for the Titanic. The Navy was his benefactor, and they set the priorities. Priority one was the missing potential doomsday devices, and priority two was the monument to man's hubris and graveyard of the humble peasants and crew who paid the price for it. Seriously, though. Take a look at the numbers.

No no no, rich women and children first!

Ballard's mission was a success, and he had 12 days leftover to actually look for the Titanic. Against the odds, he found it. The Navy, as it turns out, was less than pleased with the latter success. When the discovery came out, Robert Ballard was an instant celebrity. That meant a lot of attention on something they'd rather keep on the DL. Whatever choice words they shared in private, they let Ballard go ahead and take his discovery public.

Which ultimately led to James Cameron drawing Kate Winslet naked and blaming it on Leonardo DiCaprio

Now we have artifacts, films, books, and a much better understanding of the design flaws that let a sideswiping iceberg sink the unsinkable. And it's all thanks to two more tragic and terrifying shipwrecks in the same area. Shipwrecks that may or may not have poisoned nearby ocean depths with radiation. That part's not unclassified yet.

Holy shit.